"The Da Vinci Code" Book Club

[cantdog]

No, and the fact that there aren't any blue monkeys flying out of my butt doesn't mean that there will never be blue monkeys flying out of my butt. I mean, sure, there could be all sorts of evidence we don't know about, but it's kind of silly to start building castles in the air. Maybe Jesus was an extraterrestrial, or maybe he had a drinking problem, or maybe he was high on ergot fungus and that's why he thought he was God on earth (that's someone else's theory). In other words, if all bets are off, then all bets are off and anything is possible.

In Tom Robbins' The Last Roadside Attraction, the secret is that the Vatican has Jesus' body down in the vault, which means that the whole resurrection was a fraud. Now that's a secret worth keeping!

---dr.M.

The closest thing to a contemporary record is the Gospels and the works of Josephus, who chronicled the Jewish revolt (Masada and all that). There are indeed some references in Josephus which may be to this Joshua or Jeshua fellow. The early church left some traces, but again, a century later.

What language the sources use is really moot, I think, doc.

But all bets, especially absolutely all bets, I don't think can be off. You'd have to harmonize your wild tale of speculation with some of the sources in the epistles and the gospels, Josephus (although his doesn't limit you much, frankly) and Justin Martyr, the Coptic Christian traditions, and so on. But there's room for a lot of movement.

I like the Wandering Jew stories, myself. At one point Christ tells a crowd that not everyone in the crowd will have died by the time the Kingdom comes. This has been taken to mean that one member of the crowd lives on even today. So there's the Wandering Jew tradition. It's a wonderful foil for satire, a real outside observer.

 

[sweetnpetite]

I believe that Bezu means "Bull"

 

[sweetnpetite]

if the fans of the biik are overreacting to something that is "just a novel" check this out: (this author is obviously writing to a catholic audience and viewing 'truth' in the light of the churches teachings, all else is false teachings and error. Any sourse not officially approved is completely illigitamate. If this is so, why the hostility?)

Tho following article is a prime example of how America has little struggle disputing facts of Islamic Faith, Judism, and even the number of those slaughtered during the holocaust, however when a "FICTIONAL" book challenges Christianity the intellectuals of our churches begin to launch defamation campaigns. I now understand how some Jews feel conflicted with Mel Gibson's account in the Passion of the Christ after reading Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code followed by this article.


Dismantling The Da Vinci Code
by Sandra Miesel


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"The Grail," Langdon said, "is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be "searching for the chalice" were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine." (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239)

The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but difficult-to-attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord Stanley’s Cup. While the original Grail—the cup Jesus allegedly used at the Last Supper—normally inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance, Dan Brown’s recent mega–best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, rips it away to the realm of esoteric history.

But his book is more than just the story of a quest for the Grail—he wholly reinterprets the Grail legend. In doing so, Brown inverts the insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a container symbolically a woman’s body. And that container has a name every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the blood of Jesus Christ in her womb while bearing his children.

Over the centuries, the Grail-keepers have been guarding the true (and continuing) bloodline of Christ and the relics of the Magdalen, not a material vessel. Therefore Brown claims that "the quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene," a conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the other Grail knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the Last Supper.

The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator inside the museum. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy professor of symbolism from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter, burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Nevue. Together with crippled millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one step ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei "monk" named Silas who will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the "Grail."

But despite the frenetic pacing, at no point is action allowed to interfere with a good lecture. Before the story comes full circle back to the Louvre, readers face a barrage of codes, puzzles, mysteries, and conspiracies.

With his twice-stated principle, "Everybody loves a conspiracy," Brown is reminiscent of the famous author who crafted her product by studying the features of ten earlier best-sellers. It would be too easy to criticize him for characters thin as plastic wrap, undistinguished prose, and improbable action. But Brown isn’t so much writing badly as writing in a particular way best calculated to attract a female audience. (Women, after all, buy most of the nation’s books.) He has married a thriller plot to a romance-novel technique. Notice how each character is an extreme type…effortlessly brilliant, smarmy, sinister, or psychotic as needed, moving against luxurious but curiously flat backdrops. Avoiding gore and bedroom gymnastics, he shows only one brief kiss and a sexual ritual performed by a married couple. The risqué allusions are fleeting although the text lingers over some bloody Opus Dei mortifications. In short, Brown has fabricated a novel perfect for a ladies’ book club.

Brown’s lack of seriousness shows in the games he plays with his character names—Robert Langdon, "bright fame long don" (distinguished and virile); Sophie Nevue, "wisdom New Eve"; the irascible taurine detective Bezu Fache, "zebu anger." The servant who leads the police to them is Legaludec, "legal duce." The murdered curator takes his surname, Saunière, from a real Catholic priest whose occult antics sparked interest in the Grail secret. As an inside joke, Brown even writes in his real-life editor (Faukman is Kaufman).

While his extensive use of fictional formulas may be the secret to Brown’s stardom, his anti-Christian message can’t have hurt him in publishing circles: The Da Vinci Code debuted atop the New York Times best-seller list. By manipulating his audience through the conventions of romance-writing, Brown invites readers to identify with his smart, glamorous characters who’ve seen through the impostures of the clerics who hide the "truth" about Jesus and his wife. Blasphemy is delivered in a soft voice with a knowing chuckle: "[E]very faith in the world is based on fabrication."

But even Brown has his limits. To dodge charges of outright bigotry, he includes a climactic twist in the story that absolves the Church of assassination. And although he presents Christianity as a false root and branch, he’s willing to tolerate it for its charitable works.

(Of course, Catholic Christianity will become even more tolerable once the new liberal pope elected in Brown’s previous Langdon novel, Angels & Demons, abandons outmoded teachings. "Third-century laws cannot be applied to the modern followers of Christ," says one of the book’s progressive cardinals.)

Where Is He Getting All of This?

Brown actually cites his principal sources within the text of his novel. One is a specimen of academic feminist scholarship: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The others are popular esoteric histories: The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince; Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine and The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, both by Margaret Starbird. (Starbird, a self-identified Catholic, has her books published by Matthew Fox’s outfit, Bear & Co.) Another influence, at least at second remove, is The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.

The use of such unreliable sources belies Brown’s pretensions to intellectuality. But the act has apparently fooled at least some of his readers—the New York Daily News book reviewer trumpeted, "His research is impeccable."

But despite Brown’s scholarly airs, a writer who thinks the Merovingians founded Paris and forgets that the popes once lived in Avignon is hardly a model researcher. And for him to state that the Church burned five million women as witches shows a willful—and malicious—ignorance of the historical record. The latest figures for deaths during the European witch craze are between 30,000 to 50,000 victims. Not all were executed by the Church, not all were women, and not all were burned. Brown’s claim that educated women, priestesses, and midwives were singled out by witch-hunters is not only false, it betrays his goddess-friendly sources.

A Multitude of Errors

So error-laden is The Da Vinci Code that the educated reader actually applauds those rare occasions where Brown stumbles (despite himself) into the truth. A few examples of his "impeccable" research: He claims that the motions of the planet Venus trace a pentacle (the so-called Ishtar pentagram) symbolizing the goddess. But it isn’t a perfect figure and has nothing to do with the length of the Olympiad. The ancient Olympic games were celebrated in honor of Zeus Olympias, not Aphrodite, and occurred every four years.

Brown’s contention that the five linked rings of the modern Olympic Games are a secret tribute to the goddess is also wrong—each set of games was supposed to add a ring to the design but the organizers stopped at five. And his efforts to read goddess propaganda into art, literature, and even Disney cartoons are simply ridiculous.

No datum is too dubious for inclusion, and reality falls quickly by the wayside. For instance, the Opus Dei bishop encourages his albino assassin by telling him that Noah was also an albino (a notion drawn from the non-canonical 1 Enoch 106:2). Yet albinism somehow fails to interfere with the man’s eyesight as it physiologically would.

But a far more important example is Brown’s treatment of Gothic architecture as a style full of goddess-worshipping symbols and coded messages to confound the uninitiated. Building on Barbara Walker’s claim that "like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral represented the body of the Goddess," The Templar Revelation asserts: "Sexual symbolism is found in the great Gothic cathedrals which were masterminded by the Knights Templar...both of which represent intimate female anatomy: the arch, which draws the worshipper into the body of Mother Church, evokes the vulva." In The Da Vinci Code, these sentiments are transformed into a character’s description of "a cathedral’s long hollow nave as a secret tribute to a woman’s womb...complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway."

These remarks cannot be brushed aside as opinions of the villain; Langdon, the book’s hero, refers to his own lectures about goddess-symbolism at Chartres.

These bizarre interpretations betray no acquaintance with the actual development or construction of Gothic architecture, and correcting the countless errors becomes a tiresome exercise: The Templars had nothing to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by bishops and their canons throughout Europe. They were unlettered men with no arcane knowledge of "sacred geometry" passed down from the pyramid builders. They did not wield tools themselves on their own projects, nor did they found masons’ guilds to build for others. Not all their churches were round, nor was roundness a defiant insult to the Church. Rather than being a tribute to the divine feminine, their round churches honored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Actually looking at Gothic churches and their predecessors deflates the idea of female symbolism. Large medieval churches typically had three front doors on the west plus triple entrances to their transepts on the north and south. (What part of a woman’s anatomy does a transept represent? Or the kink in Chartres’s main aisle?) Romanesque churches—including ones that predate the founding of the Templars—have similar bands of decoration arching over their entrances. Both Gothic and Romanesque churches have the long, rectangular nave inherited from Late Antique basilicas, ultimately derived from Roman public buildings. Neither Brown nor his sources consider what symbolism medieval churchmen such as Suger of St.-Denis or William Durandus read in church design. It certainly wasn’t goddess-worship.

False Claims

If the above seems like a pile driver applied to a gnat, the blows are necessary to demonstrate the utter falseness of Brown’s material. His willful distortions of documented history are more than matched by his outlandish claims about controversial subjects. But to a postmodernist, one construct of reality is as good as any other.

Brown’s approach seems to consist of grabbing large chunks of his stated sources and tossing them together in a salad of a story. From Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown lifts the concept of the Grail as a metaphor for a sacred lineage by arbitrarily breaking a medieval French term, Sangraal (Holy Grail), into sang (blood) and raal (royal). This holy blood, according to Brown, descended from Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene, to the Merovingian dynasty in Dark Ages France, surviving its fall to persist in several modern French families, including that of Pierre Plantard, a leader of the mysterious Priory of Sion. The Priory—an actual organization officially registered with the French government in 1956—makes extraordinary claims of antiquity as the "real" power behind the Knights Templar. It most likely originated after World War II and was first brought to public notice in 1962. With the exception of filmmaker Jean Cocteau, its illustrious list of Grand Masters—which include Leonardo da Vinci, Issac Newton, and Victor Hugo—is not credible, although it’s presented as true by Brown.

Brown doesn’t accept a political motivation for the Priory’s activities. Instead he picks up The Templar Revelation’s view of the organization as a cult of secret goddess-worshippers who have preserved ancient Gnostic wisdom and records of Christ’s true mission, which would completely overturn Christianity if released. Significantly, Brown omits the rest of the book’s thesis that makes Christ and Mary Magdalene unmarried sex partners performing the erotic mysteries of Isis. Perhaps even a gullible mass-market audience has its limits.

From both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation, Brown takes a negative view of the Bible and a grossly distorted image of Jesus. He’s neither the Messiah nor a humble carpenter but a wealthy, trained religious teacher bent on regaining the throne of David. His credentials are amplified by his relationship with the rich Magdalen who carries the royal blood of Benjamin: "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," laments one of Brown’s characters.

Yet it’s Brown’s Christology that’s false—and blindingly so. He requires the present New Testament to be a post-Constantinian fabrication that displaced true accounts now represented only by surviving Gnostic texts. He claims that Christ wasn’t considered divine until the Council of Nicea voted him so in 325 at the behest of the emperor. Then Constantine—a lifelong sun worshipper—ordered all older scriptural texts destroyed, which is why no complete set of Gospels predates the fourth century. Christians somehow failed to notice the sudden and drastic change in their doctrine.

But by Brown’s specious reasoning, the Old Testament can’t be authentic either because complete Hebrew Scriptures are no more than a thousand years old. And yet the texts were transmitted so accurately that they do match well with the Dead Sea Scrolls from a thousand years earlier. Analysis of textual families, comparison with fragments and quotations, plus historical correlations securely date the orthodox Gospels to the first century and indicate that they’re earlier than the Gnostic forgeries. (The Epistles of St. Paul are, of course, even earlier than the Gospels.)

Primitive Church documents and the testimony of the ante-Nicean Fathers confirm that Christians have always believed Jesus to be Lord, God, and Savior—even when that faith meant death. The earliest partial canon of Scripture dates from the late second century and already rejected Gnostic writings. For Brown, it isn’t enough to credit Constantine with the divinization of Jesus. The emperor’s old adherence to the cult of the Invincible Sun also meant repackaging sun worship as the new faith. Brown drags out old (and long-discredited) charges by virulent anti-Catholics like Alexander Hislop who accused the Church of perpetuating Babylonian mysteries, as well as 19th-century rationalists who regarded Christ as just another dying savior-god.

Unsurprisingly, Brown misses no opportunity to criticize Christianity and its pitiable adherents. (The church in question is always the Catholic Church, though his villain does sneer once at Anglicans—for their grimness, of all things.) He routinely and anachronistically refers to the Church as "the Vatican," even when popes weren’t in residence there. He systematically portrays it throughout history as deceitful, power-crazed, crafty, and murderous: "The Church may no longer employ crusades to slaughter, but their influence is no less persuasive. No less insidious."

Goddess Worship and the Magdalen

Worst of all, in Brown’s eyes, is the fact that the pleasure-hating, sex-hating, woman-hating Church suppressed goddess worship and eliminated the divine feminine. He claims that goddess worship universally dominated pre-Christian paganism with the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) as its central rite. His enthusiasm for fertility rites is enthusiasm for sexuality, not procreation. What else would one expect of a Cathar sympathizer?

Astonishingly, Brown claims that Jews in Solomon’s Temple adored Yahweh and his feminine counterpart, the Shekinah, via the services of sacred prostitutes—possibly a twisted version of the Temple’s corruption after Solomon (1 Kings 14:24 and 2 Kings 23:4-15). Moreover, he says that the tetragrammaton YHWH derives from "Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah."

But as any first-year Scripture student could tell you, Jehovah is actually a 16th-century rendering of Yahweh using the vowels of Adonai ("Lord"). In fact, goddesses did not dominate the pre-Christian world—not in the religions of Rome, her barbarian subjects, Egypt, or even Semitic lands where the hieros gamos was an ancient practice. Nor did the Hellenized cult of Isis appear to have included sex in its secret rites.

Contrary to yet another of Brown’s claims, Tarot cards do not teach goddess doctrine. They were invented for innocent gaming purposes in the 15th century and didn’t acquire occult associations until the late 18th. Playing-card suites carry no Grail symbolism. The notion of diamonds symbolizing pentacles is a deliberate misrepresentation by British occultist A. E. Waite. And the number five—so crucial to Brown’s puzzles—has some connections with the protective goddess but myriad others besides, including human life, the five senses, and the Five Wounds of Christ.

Brown’s treatment of Mary Magdalene is sheer delusion. In The Da Vinci Code, she’s no penitent whore but Christ’s royal consort and the intended head of His Church, supplanted by Peter and defamed by churchmen. She fled west with her offspring to Provence, where medieval Cathars would keep the original teachings of Jesus alive. The Priory of Sion still guards her relics and records, excavated by the Templars from the subterranean Holy of Holies. It also protects her descendants—including Brown’s heroine.

Although many people still picture the Magdalen as a sinful woman who anointed Jesus and equate her with Mary of Bethany, that conflation is actually the later work of Pope St. Gregory the Great. The East has always kept them separate and said that the Magdalen, "apostle to the apostles," died in Ephesus. The legend of her voyage to Provence is no earlier than the ninth century, and her relics weren’t reported there until the 13th. Catholic critics, including the Bollandists, have been debunking the legend and distinguishing the three ladies since the 17th century.

Brown uses two Gnostic documents, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, to prove that the Magdalen was Christ’s "companion," meaning sexual partner. The apostles were jealous that Jesus used to "kiss her on the mouth" and favored her over them. He cites exactly the same passages quoted in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation and even picks up the latter’s reference to The Last Temptation of Christ. What these books neglect to mention is the infamous final verse of the Gospel of Thomas. When Peter sneers that "women are not worthy of Life," Jesus responds, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male.... For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

That’s certainly an odd way to "honor" one’s spouse or exalt the status of women.

The Knights Templar

Brown likewise misrepresents the history of the Knights Templar. The oldest of the military-religious orders, the Knights were founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Their rule, attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, was approved in 1128 and generous donors granted them numerous properties in Europe for support. Rendered redundant after the last Crusader stronghold fell in 1291, the Templars’ pride and wealth—they were also bankers—earned them keen hostility.

Brown maliciously ascribes the suppression of the Templars to "Machiavellian" Pope Clement V, whom they were blackmailing with the Grail secret. His "ingeniously planned sting operation" had his soldiers suddenly arrest all Templars. Charged with Satanism, sodomy, and blasphemy, they were tortured into confessing and burned as heretics, their ashes "tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber."

But in reality, the initiative for crushing the Templars came from King Philip the Fair of France, whose royal officials did the arresting in 1307. About 120 Templars were burned by local Inquisitorial courts in France for not confessing or retracting a confession, as happened with Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Few Templars suffered death elsewhere although their order was abolished in 1312. Clement, a weak, sickly Frenchman manipulated by his king, burned no one in Rome inasmuch as he was the first pope to reign from Avignon (so much for the ashes in the Tiber).

Moreover, the mysterious stone idol that the Templars were accused of worshiping is associated with fertility in only one of more than a hundred confessions. Sodomy was the scandalous—and possibly true—charge against the order, not ritual fornication. The Templars have been darlings of occultism since their myth as masters of secret wisdom and fabulous treasure began to coalesce in the late 18th century. Freemasons and even Nazis have hailed them as brothers. Now it’s the turn of neo-Gnostics.

Twisting Da Vinci

Brown’s revisionist interpretations of da Vinci are as distorted as the rest of his information. He claims to have first run across these views "while I was studying art history in Seville," but they correspond point for point to material in The Templar Revelation. A writer who sees a pointed finger as a throat-cutting gesture, who says the Madonna of the Rocks was painted for nuns instead of a lay confraternity of men, who claims that da Vinci received "hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions" (actually, it was just one…and it was never executed) is simply unreliable.

Brown’s analysis of da Vinci’s work is just as ridiculous. He presents the Mona Lisa as an androgynous self-portrait when it’s widely known to portray a real woman, Madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo. The name is certainly not—as Brown claims—a mocking anagram of two Egyptian fertility deities Amon and L’Isa (Italian for Isis). How did he miss the theory, propounded by the authors of The Templar Revelation, that the Shroud of Turin is a photographed self-portrait of da Vinci?

Much of Brown’s argument centers around da Vinci’s Last Supper, a painting the author considers a coded message that reveals the truth about Jesus and the Grail. Brown points to the lack of a central chalice on the table as proof that the Grail isn’t a material vessel. But da Vinci’s painting specifically dramatizes the moment when Jesus warns, "One of you will betray me" (John 13:21). There is no Institution Narrative in St. John’s Gospel. The Eucharist is not shown there. And the person sitting next to Jesus is not Mary Magdalene (as Brown claims) but St. John, portrayed as the usual effeminate da Vinci youth, comparable to his St. John the Baptist. Jesus is in the exact center of the painting, with two pyramidal groups of three apostles on each side. Although da Vinci was a spiritually troubled homosexual, Brown’s contention that he coded his paintings with anti-Christian messages simply can’t be sustained.

Brown’s Mess

In the end, Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously researched mess. So, why bother with such a close reading of a worthless novel? The answer is simple: The Da Vinci Code takes esoterica mainstream. It may well do for Gnosticism what The Mists of Avalon did for paganism—gain it popular acceptance. After all, how many lay readers will see the blazing inaccuracies put forward as buried truths?

What’s more, in making phony claims of scholarship, Brown’s book infects readers with a virulent hostility toward Catholicism. Dozens of occult history books, conveniently cross-linked by Amazon.com, are following in its wake. And booksellers’ shelves now bulge with falsehoods few would be buying without The Da Vinci Code connection. While Brown’s assault on the Catholic Church may be a backhanded compliment, it’s one we would have happily done without.

 

[sweetnpetite]

The great sin of this book obviously, is that it questions the bible, and the churches interpretation of it.

The Da Vinci Code

Jacques Sauniere, a Curator at the Louvre museum in Paris, is killed in the first chapter. Robert Langdon, a Professor of Religious Symbology from Harvard, was at American University in Paris as a visiting lecturer. He is summoned to the murder scene in the middle of the night by the police. Jacques's body was found spread eagled naked on the floor; his arms and legs stretched out. His clothing folded neatly and piled on the floor. A Star of David was drawn on his chest and a cryptic message scratched on the floor next to the body with his blood. Unbeknownst to him Langdon is a prime suspect. Everything he says is being secretly recorded;he thinks he is there to help the police figure out the bazaar symbolism and message etched on Jacques' body and on the floor. Who killed him and why?

In the middle of the interview Sophie Neveu rushes into the museum and tells Langdon the American Embassy had an emergency message and he should call them right away. Sophie is a police cryptographer. Robert calls the number and a recorded message tells him to listen to her carefully. He is in grave danger. The voice is that of Sophie. She is convincing and she gives him directions on what to do. He believes her and follows her instructions -- we are off on a great adventure!

We learn that Jacques Sauniere was Sophie's grandfather and in his dying moments left a message for her; only she can understand its significance. The police chief resents her appearance and when she disappears with Langdon, he decides that both of them are wanted in the investigation of Jacques Sauniere's murder. Their pictures are posted in the papers and on television. They are wanted by the police for questioning. The couple has to avoid capture while at the same time try to figure out the meaning of the grandfather's message.

Brown's interpretation of Leonardo DaVinci's theological position is suspect. He suggests there are hidden symbols in many of DaVinci's works that mock the teachings of the Catholic Church. The Last Supper appears to be a beautiful rendering of Jesus and the 12th disciple is a woman hidden on the right side of Jesus. Really? We don't know that! There are twelve wine glasses on the table instead of one "Chalice." There was no single "Holy Grail" or "Chalice." Mary Magdalene is the Holy Grail! And she was pregnant with Jesus' child. There is, of course, no historical evidence on any of this but hey -- this is a work of fiction. Read and enjoy!

Brown questions the influence of the Council of Nicea of 325 CE and the impact Constantine had upon a basic teaching of the Church, viz, the humanity and divinity of Jesus. One infers that Constantine had forced the bishops to settle these differnces since Jesus was thoroughly human, married and sired a child with Mary who sat on the right side of Jesus in DaVinci's Last Supper. The debate had to be resolved for the unity of the empire. Of course no one can prove this either way.


From the opening page, the book asks readers to take its basic thesis seriously — namely, that just about everything you were taught about Christianity in Sunday School is false. You may think that Jesus claimed to be God (and is God), but no, what we know today as the divinity of Jesus is really the result of a political power play by Constantine (A.D. 280-337), the emperor of the Western Roman Empire. As politicians are wont to do, Constantine was seeking ways to maintain power, and he understood that paganism was fading and that Christianity was likely the next major player in history, so he caught the wave and used the Christian religion to help unify his constituency and solidify his powerbase. Jesus was a great prophet, says the book, but it was Constantine who elevated him to deity and had it all wrapped up theologically by orchestrating the outcome of the Council of Nicaea (325).

According to this book, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (also a descendant of King David), who was already pregnant with child (named Sarah) when she witnessed the crucifixion. After Christ died (and did not rise again), mother and child fled to Gaul (what is modern-day France). They did not leave Jerusalem because they were saddened, disillusioned, and knew the game was up. No. According to the book, Jesus was the “original feminist” (p. 248) and believed in the “Sacred Feminine” (p. 36). He along with “the ancients envisioned their world in the two halves — masculine and feminine. Their gods worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and Yang. When male and female were balanced, there was harmony in the world. When they were unbalanced, there was chaos,” explains Harvard Professor of Religious Symbology Robert Langdon, the book’s leading male character (p. 36). As the first feminist, Jesus wanted Mary to run the church after he was gone. But the male-dominated church would have none of it, and was willing to do virtually anything to maintain its hold on power, up to and including the killing of those who would expose the truth about Jesus (that he was not God, etc.) and thereby undermine its power and authority. Mary and child escaped the terror of the church, lived quiet protected lives in Gaul, and their royal bloodline eventually gave rise to the Merovingian dynasty that later ruled France. What we have in the Bible, according to The Da Vinci Code, is not reliable information from God but rather the human product of fallible man — a male-approved and unreliable document that advances patriarchy and oppresses women.

So while the story begins with a murder in the Louvre, the parallel and real target of the book appears to be Christianity. The book goes to great lengths to paint a huge bull’s-eye on the back of Christianity and fires away. And yet, it misses. Here’s why.

Authentic History Requires Proof
First, the book wants readers to believe “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (p. 1), but the facts do not seem to support this assertion. For example, the book confidently states that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) embedded codes in the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and other masterpieces to secretly communicate and safeguard the real story behind the rise of organized Christianity. But scholars do not seem to share the book’s confidence. “I think the idea that Leonardo da Vinci had secret information passed down for 40 generations that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child is entertaining, but it is not history,” John Martin of the Renaissance Society of America told News-Press.com.

“Absurd” is how J.V. Field, president of the Leonardo da Vinci Society and historian of art at the University of London, described the book’s theory about Leonardo’s putatively hidden messages. “Everything I know about how pictures were used to communicate indicates that the theory is absurd,” he told News-Press. “This means that I should require very strong evidence indeed to make me take it seriously — such as a document written by Leonardo himself giving an explanation of the procedure he followed; and the authority of the document would need to be established by unassailable provenance. In the present case, that is clearly an unattainable standard of proof.” Authentic history requires proof, said Field, but “The Da Vinci Code offers none that scholars would recognize.”

But you do not have to be an art historian or Renaissance scholar to see that the book may not be quite as factual as it purports to be. Religious symbolism is at the center of this book, and at the center of this symbolism is the infamous “apple” that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. The book’s Langdon says the apple is the “orb from which Eve partook, and he informs us that the act of eating the apple incurred “the Holy wrath of God,” was the cause of “original sin,” and became the “symbol of the fall of the sacred feminine” (p. 425).

There is more to Langdon’s confident explanation: “The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred,” he says, “but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominately male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and made unclean. It was man, not God, who created the concept of ‘original sin,’ whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy” (p. 238).

That’s an awful lot of symbolism, meaning, and condemnation to load onto the “apple” of Genesis, isn’t it? But there’s a problem: Genesis 3 never mentions an apple, which is something a professor of religious symbology at Harvard perhaps ought to know. The information there speaks of “fruit” from the tree, but not apples. And without those apples, or that word apple, specific information that is key to solving the central mystery of The Da Vinci Code evaporates into thin air. The apparent specific factualness, which is enlisted to give the novel an air of plausibility, begins to unravel at its core. What appears at first glance to bear the marks of scholarship ends up being cotton candy for the soul.

An equal lack of confidence in the book’s facticity might be attached to its rather remarkable statement about the so-called Gnostic gospels. Just on the face of it, does anybody really think the 4th-Century texts found at Nag Hammadi in central Egypt are “unaltered gospels” (p. 248), and that they are to be preferred to eyewitness accounts written by people who lived and died, were scorned and often rejected, on the basis of their personal knowledge of the information and reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and all the rest? “Calling the Nag Hammadi texts ‘unaltered’ gospels is like reading the official Soviet histories as objective fact — complete with leading figures airbrushed out of the photos,” theologian Albert Mohler wrote in a column. There is a lot of thoughtful, well-researched material available on this topic, and on the question of how individuals, from the very beginning, used objective criteria to assess which writings represented the true history and teaching of Jesus. The short classic New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, by F.F. Bruce, Christ and the Bible, by John Wenham, and The Inspiration and Canonicity of the Scriptures, by R. Laird Harris, are good places to begin.

No Substitute for Knowledge
In his just-published new book, The Market-Driven Church, Udo Middelmann writes that “faith is not a substitute for knowledge, but the response to it.” But as we see in the following passage, The Da Vinci Code sees faith as something quite different. “Every faith in the world is based on fabrication,” says Langdon. “That is the definition of faith — acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove” (p. 341, italics in original).

The biblically correct view, and the more humane view, is the one articulated by Middelmann. It should be remembered that the work of Christ was a public ministry, done out in the open and not in a corner, and that this visibility and openness to investigation stands in continuity with the entire Old Testament emphasis. Namely, that the God who created the cosmos can use that cosmos as evidence for his existence as he speaks and acts into the cosmos. Faith is not an epistemological magic wand that turns allegory into fact or falsehood into truth. From a biblical perspective, if something is not true, it should not be believed or acted upon, for “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile,” says Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:17.

In contrast, note where The Da Vinci Code would take us — namely, to the view that people should have “faith” in the “sacred feminine,” even though this belief system offers inadequate answers to the basic questions of life. What, for example, is its answer to the problem of evil, of “disharmony”? Well, none other than an impersonal Yin and Yang dualism of maleness and femaleness, which lacks a sufficient explanation for the existence and value of human personality (since everything emerges and returns finally to its impersonal origin) but also even contributes to further disharmony because the system itself posits two opposite reference points, each one vying for supremacy in an attempt to find a harmony in reality that does not appear to be there in theory. This is a recipe for radical disharmony and instability, or for suppression, for the only way a kind of stability can be achieved in this system is by one of the opposites totally or significantly suppressing the other.

The verifiable information given by the real Creator, however, takes us in a different direction. This content says there is both unity and diversity located in God himself, who is a personal being who thinks, acts, and creatively calls both male and female into harmony as beings — both of whom are made in the image of God. There is no impersonal monism here, nor do we have a chaos-generating threeism without unity. Only the biblical information allows the possibility of order without smashing the individual, but also of creativity without anarchy, which nobody wants. It sets us free as thinking and creative beings.

But The Da Vinci Code would have us bow down before the bones of Mary Magdalene, as the Harvard man Langdon does at the end of the book. Even though he himself has already said all faiths are built on fabrications, we read: “The quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one. With a sudden upwelling of reverence, Robert Langdon fell to his knees. For a moment, he thought he heard a woman’s voice . . . the wisdom of the ages . . . rising up from the chasms of the earth” (p. 454).

And yet, all of this is built on fabrication. What an ironic way to end a book that employs the reputation of brilliant men such as Leonardo da Vinci to help make its case that historic Christianity is an inhumane pack of falsehoods foisted upon an ignorant public by a male-dominated status quo. And then the male lead character is on his knees in reverence before the bones of a mere mortal woman who was, by the book’s definition, the wife of a mere mortal himself. If all faiths are built on fabrications, is the book not also saying that the faith it sets forth in the sacred feminine is also, by definition, built on fabrications? Of course it is. And so now we are at a point where the book’s own definition of faith gives a convenient rationale for the concern that many of the “facts” the book marshals against Christianity may not be facts at all.

What began with the murder of man in the name of patriarchy ends with the intellectual suicide of a man in the name of matriarchy. One begins to see a better explanation of why Christianity triumphed over paganism.

 

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Mispercption, Hoax or Denial?

Mispercption, Hoax or Denial?
In recent years, a great deal of information has been published in books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail alleging that the Holy Grail actually refers to a bloodline descended from Jesus. By this account Jesus and Mary Magdalene produced offspring, and their descendants gave rise to the Merovingian dynasty, which ruled France from 476 to 750 A.D. Well intentioned readers and even authors have been deceived by this story and have mistaken it for the revelation of a suppressed history. Unfortunately the only thing that has been suppressed is the truth.


The Grail is not a bloodline. This false story originated in reams of fraudulent documents created by an extreme right-wing French sect. The group responsible for these fictions, calling itself the "Priory of Sion" and claiming an ancient esoteric lineage, has kept its own authentic history carefully hidden. How it constructed its fraud has not been revealed. It is long past time for the light of truth to reveal the "Priory of Sion" and the fictional bloodline it has promoted for what they are really are -- a fraud. The background of this group reveals its actual motives and sources of information.


The trail to the "Priory of Sion" fraud begins in mid-nineteenth-century France. A resurgent interest in the occult led to the creation of many esoteric groups. Members of these groups often belonged to several organizations. Their leaders often broke away to form competing factions. At the same time, constant turmoil in the French government drew France into two increasingly hostile camps jousting for political supremacy. The royalists, composed of the Catholic Church, the far right, and the supporters of the old system of royalty, vied for power with the republicans, composed of Freemasons and other supporters of democratically elected governments. Their struggle affected the lives and views of every Frenchman. From 1877 to the eve of the Second World War, Freemasons dominated French government. Their domination earned them bitter enemies.


In the 1880's, at the height of this political conflict, Joseph Alexandre St. Yves d'Alveydre, "the supreme Hermeticist of his epoch,"(1) proposed a new idea for injecting moral values into governing society. He called it "synarchy" and claimed it was the method used by the Knights Templar to change medieval society. An elect band of initiates would influence groups representing different aspects of society. Those groups would influence their spheres and ultimately the entire social order.


By the turn of the century, the royalist faction came to fear synarchy, whose influence had spread beyond esoteric groups. By the 1920s, Masonic groups with distinctly synarchist policies were a reality in France. In the 1930s, even a leftist group, called the X-Cruise Club, advocated a technocracy with synarchist ideas.(2)


In this era, the French far right formed its own seemingly esoteric groups. But they were actually front organizations, pretending to have Masonic and esoteric affiliations in order to draw support away from the Masons. As anti-semitism spread across Europe in the 1930s, the French far right denounced Masons and Jews in the same breath. When fourteen initiatic orders created a federation called FUDOSI to promote peace and positive ideals, the far right increased its formation of pseudo-Masonic groups.


During the war, Nazi occupation policy was to arrest leaders of esoteric organizations, put them in concentration camps, and seize their groups' records and membership rolls, which were placed in a central depository. In France this depository was called the Centre d'Action Maconnique, and the French occupation government at Vichy actively aided the Gestapo in its persecution of Masonic and esoteric orders. So great was the far right's fear of Masonic influence that an unknown source even issued a document called the "Chauvin Report," alleging Masonic involvement in Vichy. (3) While these events were taking place, the individuals who later formed the "Priory of Sion" were being gathered into two groups. One group, known to have been in existence as early as 1934, was called Alpha Galates. Toward the end of the 1930s Alpha Galates utilized a young man named Pierre Plantard, born March 18, 1920, as its titular head.


In 1937, at the age of only seventeen, Plantard attempted to found an anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic group to engage "purifying and renewing France" and sought official permission to publish a periodical called "The Renewal of France." (4) This theme Would constantly appear in association with Alpha Galates and later with the "Priory of Sion."


By 1939, Plantard headed a Catholic youth group holding retreats in Brittany for teenagers and in 1939 was also noted as addressing a gathering of Catholic youth. Either Plantard was exceptionally precocious or he was carefully coached by older people, including a probable sponsor inside the Church who arranged his engagements. Most likely, he made these connections through ties to the parent organization of Alpha Galates and through his own youthful activities at the Parisian parish of St. Louis d'Antin, where he eventually became its sexton.


Under the collaborationist Vichy regime, the group behind Plantard and Alpha Galates sought influence with the government. On December 16, 1940, Plantard wrote to Marshal Petain, head of the Vichy regime, denouncing a vast Jewish-Masonic plot. But he failed to receive any attention beyond routine entries in police files. In 1941, Plantard applied to found an organization called "French National Renewal" but was denied official permission in September of that year. Finally in 1942, Plantard and his superiors again sought public visibility, now openly using the name Alpha Galates and promoting a publication called Vaincre ("Conquer").


Vaincre, which commenced publication in September 1942, was filled with anti-Semitic, fawningly pro-Vichy articles and sprinkled with shallow, superficial esoterica on Celtic traditions and chivalry. Nonetheless Alpha Galates tried to present this journal as the clearinghouse of a relatively sizable and cohesive body of young people. After six issues it ceased publication. But it earned Plantard some recognition. He was periodically observed by the police. As late as February 1945, the police were still investigating Alpha Galates and its revolving-door membership of 50 or so, and concluded it had no serious purpose. But at least one serious seeker, Robert Amadou, who joined Alpha Galates believing it was a genuine esoteric group, suggests that its focus was political. Later a Freemason and Martinist, after 40 years Amadou refused to discuss Alpha Galates, only saying, "For my part, I have never been involved in political activity, before or since."


In 1947, while a revived FUDOSI met in Paris, Pierre Plantard filed the legal papers necessary to create another organization, called the Latin Academy. Its titular head was his own mother. Its ostensible purpose was "historical research." Its real purpose was to carry on the right-wing program of its predecessor. By the mid-1950s Plantard began promoting himself in Catholic circles as the Merovingian pretender to the throne of France. One place where he engaged in these activities was the Paris church and seminary of St. Sulpice.(7)


In 1956, Plantard and others created a new group named the "Priory of Sion." It had statutes remarkably similar to those of Alpha Galates and published a magazine called Circuit. Disinformation which would eventually become widespread about the Rennes-le-Chateau affair also began to appear, starting in the magazine La Depeche de Midi, in early 1956.(8)


With the French government in turmoil in 1958, Plantard and his group again sought political influence, alleging that they controlled the pro-de Gaulle Committees of Public Safety and utilizing Plantard-written articles in the newspaper Le Monde to imply a secret association between de Gaulle and Plantard.(9) Any connection between de Gaulle and the self-styled "eminences grises" from whom the great of this world seek counsel(10) is unknown to de Gaulles associates and biographers. But by 1959, new issues of Circuit were trumpeting this link.


Circuit shifted to a steady diet of superficial Masonic and esoteric subjects, flirting with mythology, astrology, and chivalry; restructuring French government; the unique (but unspecified) greatness of Pierre Plantard; and, of course, French National Renewal. They also pointedly and proudly promoted Vaincre's anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic back issues. (11)


The book Treasures of the World by Robert Charroux proved a popular success in France in 1962. Charroux's mixture of mysticism, historical mysteries, and lost treasures, and public interest in his recounting of the mystery of Gisors, allowed the "Priory" to launch itself into public view. Claiming to be an inside source, the "Priory" alleged that the lost underground chapel of St. Anne in Gisors, Normandy, contained either secret "Priory" records" or the lost treasure of the Knights Templars. None of these fictions materialized. But they gave the "Priory" the visibility to successfully promote itself and its false history of France, descendants of Jesus, and esoteric orders in books and articles.


The real Priory of Sion was an authentic Catholic monastic order. A priory is a religious house or order. Sion or Zion is the ancient name for Jerusalem, where the order was headquartered at the monastery of Our Lady of Mt. Zion. It transferred its headquarters to St. Leonard d'Acre in Palestine and later to Sicily. In 1617 it ceased to exist and was absorbed into the Jesuit order." It was never a seething cabal of esoteric and political interests, never had any influence over the Templars or any esoteric orders, and does not exist today as a legitimate order, Catholic or otherwise. It has been appropriated like many authentic histories, esoteric traditions, and orders to create a false history. In deference to the truth, in the remainder of this article I will refer to the false "Priory" in quotes.


Two examples will quickly illustrate how the false "Priory" has created its fictions. It has attempted to appropriate Templar history and portray the Templars as subservient to it and to its fictional bloodline(14) through totally fabricated documents various authors call "the Priory documents" and by such claims as one that the familial home of a Templar Grand Master was at Blanchefort, near Rennes-le-Chateau. Yet Blanchefort was the home of a Cathar noble by that name, not a Templar Grand Master.(15) Few researchers have bothered to investigate this or innumerable other outright fictions.


Similarly, Plantard alleges his "suppressed" last name is St. Clair, although no shred of proof supports this claim.(16) The Sinclairs (originally St. Clair), hereditary heads of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, were related by marriage to Templar founder Hugh de Payen. In this way, the "Priory" seeks to imply that it has an ancient and leading role in Masonry. Appropriating honored names associated with the esoteric is a tactic used at the time of Alpha Galates by prewar, anti-Masonic French rightists.(17)


The "Priory" constructed its fiction of the bloodline of Jesus by first creating the appearance of an authentic esoteric lineage for itself. It accomplished this by placing fabricated histories in libraries, by falsely associating itself with ancient esoteric groups, and by usurping the heritage of prewar esoteric groups. The group the "Priory" has plagiarized most from is the Order of the Rose-Croix of the Temple and the Grail, founded by Josephin Peladan in 1891.


This group is intimately connected with the real affair of Rennes-le Chateau. Some of its real and alleged links adopted by the "Priory" include: the work of the painter Nicolas Poussin; Emma Calve, a singer with numerous occult connections; claimed associations -with the Holy Vehm, the Knights Templar, and the survival of a supposedly lost monarchy; association with prominent cultural figures-, sensationalistic announcements of the discovery of the tomb of Jesus; the supposition of a higher esoteric order with supreme knowledge; the Cathars; and other themes appearing in "Priory" inspired stories. Berenger Sauniere, cure of Rennes-le-Chateau from 1885 to 1917, may have been associated with the Order of the Rose-Croix of the Temple and the Grail. This association is the source of the incomplete information which the "Priory of Sion" has inherited about Rennes-le-Chateau through the "Priory's" real founder, "Count Israel" Monti.


The actual "Priory" history begins with that obscure man, Georges "Count Israel" Monti, secretary to Josephin Peladan. Born in Toulouse in 1880 and Jesuit-educated, Monti considered the priesthood but entered the world of initiatic orders at age 22 and became a high-level Scottish Rite Mason.(18) By 1906 he had rapidly advanced in Peladan's order. In 1908 he journeyed to Egypt and in 1909 to Munich on Peladan's behalf.


Following Peladan's death in 1918, Monti appears as one trying desperately to be at ground zero of occult activities, but always only appearing as a supporting player with incomplete knowledge. He so craved recognition that he even affected the title "Count Israel" Monti. He began to tell melodramatic tales of his involvement in the supposed political activities of esoteric orders, although his only known political connection was with Leon Daudet, brother of the leader of the rightist group Action Francaise. And in 1922 Monti excitedly claimed an affiliation with the controversial magician Aleister Crowley and his occult group, and said he had been charged by occult groups in England and Germany to begin a new order.


In 1924, the sorcerer's apprentice sought to become the master. Monti acted to fulfill these sweeping directives and formed a new group. According to occultist Anne Osmont, he moved forward with a plan "to destroy all which is dear and precious to me, to build an illusory society." Together with a man calling himself Gaston Demengel, Monti, using the name Marcus Vella, formed a group calling itself "Groupe occidental d'etudes esoteriques," a very small, supposedly esoteric order. This organization was highly secretive, pretending to be an elite body dedicated to bringing the world a lasting peace and having a male and female branch (the Isis lodge). The extent of its membership and activities is unknown. Its only known document claimed as one of its goals the reconciliation of esoteric orders with the Catholic Church. This goal, as well as the pretensions of exclusivity, elitism, and an alleged interest in world peace, is echoed in the "Priory of Sion."


In October 1936, the Bulletin des ateliers superieurs de la Grande Loge de K France, the organ of the Masonic Grand Lodge, published a piece denouncing Monti as a trafficker in information, a fraudulent claimant to nobility, and a supposed Jesuit agent. On the 21st of the same month, Monti was found dead. Monti's close associate Dr. Camille Savoire rushed to examine him and claimed that Monti had been poisoned. Savoire is mentioned in the first issues of Alpha Galates' magazine Vaincre as one who, along with Plantard, rightist Louis Le Fur, and a Maurice Moncharville, was responsible for creating Vaincre. In issue No. 4 of Vaincre, Le Fur writes that he was initiated into Alpha Galates by Georges Monti in 1934. From 1934 until his death, Monti lived at 80 rue du Rocher in Paris. Perhaps too coincidentally, in 1942-43, Vaincre was printed down the street at 45 rue du Rocher by a Poirer Murat, whose name would surface after the war in association with Plantard.


Savoire had a long history of forming alternative esoteric groups. While active in Masonry, Savoire disagreed with long-established Masonic practices, goals, and leadership. Like Monti, Savoire was made a high-level Scottish Rite Mason, in Geneva in 1910. But by 1913, Savoire had formed his own group, the National Grand Lodge of France. In 1935, after the formation of Alpha Galates, he formed the interestingly named Grand Priory of the Gauls. He died in 1951. His close association with Monti and his involvement with alternative orders makes Savoire a likely candidate for assuming Monti's vacated leadership of Groupe occidental d'etudes esoteriques.


There are many associations between the prewar activities of Plantard and Monti and their associates on the one hand and the themes identified with the postwar "Priory of Sion" on the other. It is highly likely that Alpha Galates was a front for Monti's group and that Monti's group continued on, subsequently implementing a plan which would be carried out under the guise of the "Priory of Sion."


The "Priory's" first objective is to position itself in the mind of an unknowing public as the supreme Western esoteric organization. It dreams of utilizing that constituency in a synarchy-like fashion to promote its hybrid agenda of right-wing politics and turn-of-the-century esoteric teachings. It does not represent the real teachings of any positive esoteric order. It is materialistic, obsessed with attaining influence, and has fabricated documents without regard for any ethical considerations. Its program is to manipulate people through lies in order to promote itself.


The so-called bloodline created by the "Priory" does not exist. There is no descent from Jesus through the Merovingians or other families; in fact there is no genuine evidence of any bloodline descended from Christ. The survival of the Merovingian bloodline as promulgated in the "Priory" documents is based on the alleged marriage of Giselle de Razes to the seventh-century Merovingian King Dagobert Il. Giselle de Razes never existed. Plantard and his associates fabricated her.


The fraudulent history of the "Priory of Sion" and its false bloodline was created by utilizing the vast amount of esoteric documents publicly available in French libraries and by depositing its own documents among them. For example, Madan's papers were deposited in the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, and St.-Yves' papers were deposited in the Sorbonne in 1938 by the son of the well-known French occultist Papus, along with many of Papus' own papers.(19) An investigation by researcher Paul Smith has shown that some of the documents indicating a supposed bloodline and a "Priory" -inspired poem called Le serpent rouge were printed on the same press. During the war it is probable that the "Priory" also had access to the seized records of Masonic and esoteric societies, some quite old, which were deposited in the occupation-controlled Centre d'Action Maconnique. This depository was headed by Henri Coston, a right-wing, anti-Semitic journalist and collaborator, who was quoted on the first page of Vaincre No. 1.


Similarly, to create credibility with researchers, the "Priory" attached Plantard's family tree to an authentic genealogy originally appearing in a special edition of the historical journal Les cahiers de l'histoire No. 1 (1960), which was deposited in libraries containing other fabricated "Priory" documents.(20)


The concept of the phony bloodline originated in two places. In the 1930s the writings and speeches of the Italian esotericist Julius Evola received prominence in many philosophical, esoteric, and right-wing political circles, and were admired by Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler. Many "Priory" themes originated in Evola's ideas. To Evola's thinking, in the old system of world order, the king was believed to be a sacred being. Divine virtues and powers descended on him. Traditional institutions were based on sacred legacies. The state itself had a transcendent meaning. Evola also referred to a special quality of the blood which he alleged once existed in one royal house. Above all, he admired Godfrey of Bouillon, first Latin ruler of Palestine after the First Crusade, as the ideal ruler, the lux monarchorum ("light of monarchs").(21) Man could only be restored, Evola wrote, by the government of a spiritual elite, those wearing the belt or cord of initiates that marks the "carriers of some invisible influence."(22) All these ideas permeate "Priory" thought; "the Priory documents" even require members to have a cord at initiation.


To create the concept of the bloodline, Evola's ideas were melded with one other source, the doctoral dissertation of Walter Johannes Stein, originally published in Germany in 1928.(23) In this work, called The Ninth Century: World History in the Light of the Holy Grail, Stein, a close associate of Rudolf Steiner, detailed what he felt was the historical and symbolic background behind the Grail sagas.


An appendix to The Ninth Century is a genealogical chart Stein calls the "Grail bloodline." One side extends into the royal house of France. Another extends down to Godfrey of Bouillon. Part of Stein's thesis is that events in the lives of actual historical figures served as models for the characters and for some events in the Grail stories. According to Stein, the people associated with this family tree were acknowledged in their time as being of a high spiritual nature and having paranormal capacities. Yet he also stresses that these capacities had vanished from this family hundreds of years ago.


An undisciplined reader of Stein could easily confuse the historical persons with symbols. Stein's intent is actually to illustrate how the positive spiritual forces represented by the Holy Grail are sometimes manifested in the lives and actions of people and how those actions can affect society and events. He did not in any way state or imply that the Holy Grail was, or that it represented, a bloodline. He knew very well that is not the case.


These are the sources which, when twisted and distorted, were used to fabricate the fiction that a special bloodline supported by an age-old esoteric society lay behind most of the key political events and mysteries of French history and even the Holy Grail itself.


Today the "Priory" is intermittently active. Periodically, people claiming to be its representatives still attempt to influence writers and researchers by promoting in private correspondence the "Priory's" fabricated versions of history. Many well-intentioned people have been deceived by these fabrications. Despite the disillusionment which many may now feel, it is important to know there are groups and individuals in the world who are genuinely spiritual, highly developed, and acting to benefit mankind. They have existed in the past; they exist today; they will exist in the future, as long as even only a handful of people have the courage to reach inside themselves and live their lives in accordance with a genuine spirituality. However, to preserve the truth, it is incumbent on each of us to speak out on its behalf to counterbalance the false and materialistic sensationalism of the world's "Priories of Sion." By following such a path of integrity, each of us can work to maintain true spirituality, both within ourselves and in the world. Only then will be born a better day for humanity. This is in fact one of the lessons learned on the quest of the great spiritual reality which is the genuine Holy Grail.


from: http://commonsensewonder.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3851

 

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PRIORY OF SION: THE FACTS, THE THEORIES, THE MYSTERY

PRIORY OF SION: THE FACTS, THE THEORIES, THE MYSTERY
Introduction

It has been seven years since I wrote my first article on the Priory of Sion/Rennes-les-Chateau mystery. At the time, I was heavily under the influence of the books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Lionel Fanthorpe's work. Since then, there have been a number of books released, some better, some worse, than these original influences. I have revised some of my theories, challenged some of my own assumptions, learned some new things, and encountered a great deal of contrary data. Now, I am no longer sure that the hypothesis presented at the end of Holy Blood, Holy Grail is the best for explaining the data, nor am I sure that a Priory of Sion with the characteristics ascribed to it (an 800-year uninterrupted history, 9000 members internationally) really exists. I also am not sure that what is presented as "orthodox" with regard to the Sauniere saga can really be trusted. Still, although I have encountered the work of the debunkers, I am sure of two and only two things:

the Sauniere saga cannot be explained away simply by a mass-trafficking pyramid scheme and a bad taste in décor.
Something called the Order de Sion existed in the Middle Ages up until, at the latest, the 17th century; something called the Prieure du Sion existed from at least 1956 to 1984; whether these two things have any actual relationship to each other, I am still trying to figure out.
I believe that people get lost in certain obsessive details regarding this mystery, in particular details having to do with the life of Jesus, the idea of some type of mysterious bloodline with genes from (G-d/aliens/angels/Nephilim/Merovech/take your pick), lost artefacts (the Shroud of Turin, the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the head of John the Baptist, etc.), or conspiracy theories (on the part of the Catholic Church, the French Geographic Institute/IGN, and various ludicrous New World Orders). In this essay, I'm going to attempt to present my current, "millennial" take on this mystery. I will actually attempt to argue beyond the mere basis of statements a and b, but I will attempt to present why I believe this is the case. Since this is not a scholarly essay, it will not be heavily referenced and footnoted, but I believe all assertions in here are defensible, and can present the sources on which I think they are based. Many ideas in here come from the three years of discussion I have had on the priory-of-sion egroups list, with a wide-ranging variety of erudite minds.
In lieu of writing a book on this subject, which I really at this time don't want to do, I think this essay is one of the better ways to communicate my current thoughts on this subject. I apologize for any errors in advance, but cannot claim infallibility, only a desire for accuracy. Should any of these things be proved false, I am fully willing to withdraw those statements. Unlike others writing on this subject, I have no agenda, no desire to manipulate or deceive, only to deal with the information and offer my theories and interpretations. I have decided the best way to present this data is chronologically.

Some would begin this story back in the hoary mists of prehistory, or in the time of Jesus, or with the coming of the Merovingian Franks to Gaul, or in ancient Sumeria. I prefer to start at one particular place.

1090 - 1188 The Ordre de Sion

According to the "prieure documents," a conclave of Calabrian monks who left from the Belgian Abbey of Orval in 1090 helped secure the election of Godfroi de Bouillion as de facto king of Jerusalem during the First Crusade (but as is well known, he refused the title, accepting only Defender of the Holy Sepulchre), based on their belief that he was a descendant of the Merovingians, and by that fact, according to these documents, also a descendant of King David through Jesus and Merovech. In return, Godfroi secured their installation into an Abbey on Mount Sion. These documents also claim that the Ordre of Sion and the Order of the Temple (officially, the Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon, later known as the Knights Templar, and officially recognized as such in 1118) were, until 1188, one unified organization with the same leadership.

Is there any basis to these claims? Here is what it is apparently true: there was indeed an Order of Sion based on Mt. Sion, and according to a papal bull of the 12th century, it had monasteries and abbeys elsewhere in Palestine (in particular, Mount Carmel), in southern Italy (Calabria), and in France. There is little in the official histories linking Godfroi to this order, but he is said to have founded the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, whose relationships to these other orders (the Temple and Sion) are unclear. And the official histories do not indicate any overlap between these monks and the soldier-monks of the Knights Templar. The Order seems to have occupied its "mother" abbey, Notre Dame de Sion/St. Mary of Mt. Zion, built on the foundations of the original apostolic Cenacle or Coelaneum, up until around 1291 or so, when like many Crusader holdings, it was overwhelmed by the Moslem onslaught. It actually was in the hands of the Franciscans for several more centuries, until it finally was lost to Christian ownership and was converted to a mosque.

I have found interesting links between the Order de Sion and the Carmelites. St. Berthold, the founder of the Carmelites, also originated from Calabria. Fra Lippi, a tutor of Botticelli, who is listed as a PoS GM, lived in Calabria and was known as "The Carmelite". Crotone in Calabria was the home of the Pythagorean school, and Pythagoras is said by Iamblichus to have visited Mount Carmel. Calabria was the "stomping grounds" of Joachim of Fiore and Giordano Bruno. Most interestingly, recent archaeological articles suggest the Essenes had encampments on both Mount Carmel and Mount Zion. St. Therese of Liseux turns up in a number of "PoS churches", and she took her name both from Theresa of Avila, a Discalced Carmelite and mystic, and Therese of Lidoine, a Carmelite nun who was murdered by the Revolutionary Terror in Compeigne.

The Abbey of Orval's web site says only that mysterious monks from Calabria came there in 1070, although little is known about their identity, and they were welcomed there by Count Arnould de Chiny. These "pioneers" moved out after forty years, i.e. around 1110. The legend of Orval claims that it was named by Mathilda de Tuscany, who after finding a lost ring declared the place "a Valley of Gold" (Val D'Or.) That name will turn up again... recent research also suggests that Nostradamus may have found some "Templar" materials at the Abbey of Orval.

What I have found quite interesting about this Order is their choice of real estate. According to a recent (1990) issue of Biblical Archaeology magazine, Mt. Sion seems to have been the "HQ" of the Ebionites of Jerusalem - those "Judaizing" followers of Jesus who looked to his brother James, rather than the "Apostle" Paul, for leadership. Pauline Christians, in fact, avoided the place until the Byzantine period (7th century). It looks like some of these followers even made an abortive attempt to build a 3rd Temple of Solomon on the site after the Great Revolt of 70 CE, using the ruins of the destroyed Herodian templeÖ an effort that seems to have come to an end with the decisive defeat of the Messiah Bar Kochba in 135 CE. This choice does not appear arbitrary: the Old Testament says that Solomon's Temple sat on Mt. Zion, which although identified with Mt. Moriah for many centuries, by the 2nd Temple period was once again recognized as a mountain outside the existing Jerusalem city walls. I believe their choice of Mt. Sion for their Abbey displays an obvious "Ebionite" outlook on their part.

However, it seems like several monks had vacated from this Abbey prior to its emptying in 1291, and it does appear that quite a few went back to Orleans, France with King Louis in the 12th century. Others went to southern Italy (Calabria was the home of the heresies of Joachim of Fiore - a very unorthodox territory). The Order of Sion did not apparently cease to exist, though, even after losing its "mother" abbey in Jerusalem, and according to one perhaps less than totally reliable authority, Gerard de Sede, it continued on for quite some time, until being absorbed by the Jesuits in the 17th century. Prior to this dissolution, though, the "prieure documents" claim Sion and the Templars underwent a separation, at an event called the 'cutting of the elm' at Gisors in 1188. The "prieure documents" claim Sion's first independent "grand master", Jean de Gisors, was elected at this time: Sion and the Temple were no longer under the same leadership, and each went its own way.

This event, like so many others, appears to be based on some historical events, but perhaps shrouded with the clouds of myth. We know that there was indeed an ancient elm tree at the fortress of Gisors, often used as a neutral meeting point for the monarchs of England and France. And, indeed, there was a "parting of the ways" that occurred there, but it was not a division between Sion and the Templars. In January of 1188, the kings of England and France agreed to a truce at this elm tree, so that they could launch yet another common Crusade to the Holy Land. But in August, further meetings at the tree resulted in the collapse of this truce. One side became agitated over the fact that the other was hogging all the shade from the tree, the French and English skirmished, and finally it was cut down after a bloody battle. There is no evidence that Jean de Gisors was there or the Templars, but it seems hard to see why either would be uninvolved with a struggle that occurred in their physical and moral backyards.

Thomas a Beckett met with papal legates at the tree of Gisors, after his "excommunication" of some opponents (including a Hugh St. Clair) at Vezelay. Beckett appears to have been an important figure for Jean de Gisors, who dedicated several buildings to him. He was "martyred" on December 28th, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, for refusing to back down over his stance on the separation of sacerdotal and royal authority. Gisors also has a weird "parallel legend" to RlC: whereas RlC's daemon guardian must be defeated at noon (probably on the summer solstice), Gisor's "treasure" is guarded by a daemon who can only be passed at midnight on December 24th (the winter solstice).

 

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1188 - 1307: The Rise and Fall of the Templars

1188 - 1307: The Rise and Fall of the Templars

Although the Order de Sion and the Knights Templar parted ways, at least according to the "prieure documents", in 1188, they still seem to have had some sort of interconnection, and some artefacts, knowledge, documents, etc. relating to the current 'mystery' seem to have remained in the Templars' possession. Thus, a great deal of investigation into the PoS/RlC mystery seems to revolve around the mysteries of the Templars. Did they possess some type of treasure? Were they heretics, dabbling in Ebionism, Johannism, or Essenism? Did they have some kind of "hands off" pact with the Cathars of southern France? Did they continue to survive in some kind of clandestine fashion after the order's "official" dissolution?

Again, here is what can be known. During their short but meteoric career, the Knights Templar became known for more than just their skill as soldiers or their piety. They became bankers, diplomats, and power-brokers. An elite few even became scholars, attempting to translate Hebrew Old Testament texts (such as the Book of Maccabees) into the vernacular. Charges of heresy and disloyalty dogged them for a long time, even as early as the early 12th century. Some of this undoubtedly arose from envy: as the bankers of Europe, the Temple acquired quite a formidable stash of gold. As it turns out, while northern Templars pursued the Albigensian Crusade with relish, gleefully slaughtering the Cathar heretics in the name of the Pope, southern Templars seem to have been more reluctant to take up arms against their neighbors. Scholars have argued whether this might have had to do with political loyalties (to the kingdom of Aragon) or family ties, but in any case, it does seem somewhat puzzling.

In 1307, on the rather inauspicious date of Friday, October 13th, King Philip the Fair ordered the arrest of the Templars on the charges of heresy. Historians conclude he was mostly after their wealth, having already seized the assets of the Jews in his realm a year earlier. Legal inquiries ensued, and Grand Master Jacques de Molay was thrown in prison. In 1312, during the Council of Vienne, the Pope (who was in Philip's "pocket"), dissolved the Templars as a religious order. Finally, in 1314, after refusing to renounce his claim of innocence, Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake in Paris as a relapsed heretic. Outside of France, Templars endured different levels of treatment - in some countries, they were hardly bothered at all, while in France they suffered torture, harassment, and vigorous persecution. Also, outside of France, the charges were more widely viewed with disbelief. The King and Pope did not outlast deMolay by long, dying several months after him.

As for their orthodoxy, the only real evidence that the Templars were anything less than pious, dumb, and loyal Catholic knights is their testimony at their trial. And, sadly, most of this testimony has to be ruled out, since most of it was obtained under torture. While under the hot irons of the inquisitors, the Templars admitted to intercourse with demons, worshipping black cat familiars, sodomy, and black magic, charges that no scholar takes seriously. In truth, these type of charges are a familiar litany that often turns up when a persecuted group was tortured by the inquisition - they show up during the witch-trials of two centuries later, and of trials of other Gnostic heretics centuries before. Thus, they probably reflect more of the demon-obsessed mind of the inquisitors than anything else.

Yet, there is a hidden "subtext" which suggests that, although many of the charges were trumped up in a Stalinesque (or Kafkaesque) kangaroo court (which we will return to later), heresy was already brewing among the Templars. For one thing, many Templars made a rather confusing confession. They claim they went through initiations by their superiors in which they were told to worship G-d the Father, but were also to spit on the cross and deny the Trinity. This is not the type of thing normally confessed to under torture by someone trying to tell their confessor what they wanted to hear, so the torture would end. After all, why not just say they had gone over to the Devil's side, rather than simply declaring that they had adopted a non-Trinitarian (perhaps "Ebionite"?) Christianity? Many people think the Templars incapable of heresy because they were unintellectual fighting men. However, the heresies of the Middle Ages often spread primarily among illiterate peasants.

A number of Templars outside of France, including some in England, were never tortured, yet made similar confessions. Indeed, many claim that the main heresiarch within the order was Roncelin de Fos, a 13th century Templar who was of Cathar ancestry. At some point, Roncelin began forming clandestine "cells" within the order, spreading his heretical teachings and initiations. Apparently, the leadership was unaware of this internal 'virus,' which may be why De Molay went to the grave honestly protesting his innocence - he truly had no knowledge of heresy within the order. There is also the possibility that some rather innocent deviations on the part of the Templars were simply misunderstood as "heresy" by their inquisitors and blown out of proportion. Whatever the case may be, charges suggesting the Templars were heretics went back to the 1140s - while, interestingly, their 'companion' order, the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, never faced similar chargesÖ but the only remotely heretical artefact the inquisitors ever found was a silver woman's head in a Templar perceptory marked "Caput LVIIIm".

If the Templars ever had a "treasure" other than a great stack of florins, history doesn't record it. Certainly, there are a number of Masonic ritual degrees (like the Holy Royal Arch) that suggest that they conducted some exploration on the Temple Mount, and either found some scrolls or the Ark of the Covenant itself. Other sources, like Ian Wilson, claim they had the "Mandylion" or Shroud of Turin prior to its display at Lirey in the 1350s. And, of course, there are always the persistent rumors that they held secret negotiations with the Hashisheen or Assassins led by the Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan-I-Sabah, or the Druzes of Lebanon, and from them obtained some esoteric materials. Although sources seem to disagree as to whether this treasure was spiritual, material, or documentary, this has not stopped people from looking for it, at Rosslyn Chapel, Gisors, Rennes-les-Chateau, Stenay, and elsewhere.

Equally in dispute has been the fate of the Templars after their 1312 dissolution. In many countries, they were simply folded into "new" military orders which consisted of the same people under a different name - for example, the Knights of Christ in Portugal. In England and in many countries, some went on to join their former friendly rivals, the Hospitallers. This may have been a good decision, considering the number of assets of the Templars turned over to their rivals. In France, most of the knights hung up their swords and retired to non-military monasteries, although a few went "rogue" and became mercenaries, pirates, or freebooters. However, there have always been the persistent rumors that the Templar order "survived" in some clandestine form after its own dissolution. For example, the Charter of Larmenius says that before de Molay died, he appointed a "clandestine" Grand Master to continue the order in defiance of the Pope's bull. Many of the "neo-Templar" orders of today claim they are the continuation of this 'survival', often with little or no proof. And, of course, there are those who say the Freemasons are the heirs of the Knights Templar.

Whatever the "PoS" is or was, it seems to have some interest in the Templar legacy, because in their documents they indicate some interest in Templar "materials" supposedly left behind at Gisors, where many Templars were imprisoned or detained. Assuming there is any validity to the "prieure documents" account, Sion and the Temple would have maintained some type of contact with each other, and the OdS would probably have some awareness of the disposition of their "sibling" order's people, property, and materiel.

 

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1307 - 1600: The Reign of the White Queen

1307 - 1600: The Reign of the White Queen

Itís not clear what exactly the OdS was up to in the 14th- 17th centuries, although the "prieure" documents suggest that during this time it had some fairly august leadership: Leonardo da Vinci, Nicholas Flamel, Rene D' Anjou, and Sandro Filipepi (better known as Botticelli). The alchemist Flamel translated the mysterious text of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin, whose original author was one "Abraham the Jew," through the assistance of some Spanish Rabbis. Upon his return from Spain, he is said to have achieved the "Great Work" of alchemy on the "PoS date" of January 17th. As for "Good King Rene," he seems to have been one of the figures promoting the mythic theme of Arcadia in Europe, a theme that seems an idee fixe for the "PoS". It is the appearance of daVinci on this roster - daVinci, the visionary, the artist, the man who wrote in backwards mirror writing, the inventor, the man who some say put his own face on the Shroud (although others claim it is de Molay's) - that has people most fascinated.

DaVinci seems to have had a "thing" for John the Baptist, which seems quite consonant with the apparent "PoS" interest in Johannism (the idea that John was the true Messiah and Jesus a false one, or, alternatively, that they were equal co-Messiahs). Johannites believe that there was a secret teaching passed from John the Baptist to John the Beloved Disciple (whose given name was Lazarus, but he took the "alias" of John to honor the Baptist), and to a "John" ever since. (Supposedly, every PoS GrandMaster takes the name "Jean" as an honorary title, in addition to being known as "Nautonnier" or Navigator.) Pincknett and Prince believe Da Vinci put his own face on the Shroud of Turin (despite accounts which suggest it was first shown at Lirey 200 years earlier), which was confirmed to them by someone they believed to be a member of the PoS, "Giovanni".

During this time period, the Duke Jean de Berry, who lived in Bourges, commissioned a picture-book known as Les Tres Riches Heures. A horological manuscript, illustrating the seasons of the calendar as well as miscellaneous episodes, the Heures has fascinated people with some of its strange symbolism. For example, it shows the Duke de Berry holding a caduceus or serpent-staff. The picture of the Resurrection also seems somewhat oddly dissonant with New Testament accounts, also. Certain scenes in the Heures also appear to be alluded to by the Rennes-les-Bains cleric Henri Boudet. The 20th century alchemist "Fulcanelli" had a lot to say about hidden symbolism in the Heures, and he in particular pointed to the role of Jacques Coeur of Bourges in its creation. Bourges is considered the esoteric "Coeur" of France.

Queen Blanche d'Evereaux, "The White Queen" of many prieure documents and listed as a PoS GM in those documents, had a chateau near Gisors at Neaufles. There was supposed to be a secret tunnel linking Gisors with her chateau. In the Prisoner's Tower at Gisors was imprisoned one Nicholas Poulain, an ambassador of the Douglasses of Scotland, allegedly for being Blanche's secret lover. Poulain supposedly scrawled a number of alchemical and hermetic diagrams on the walls of his jail. Poulain may have been connected to the "Freres-Aines de la Rose-Croix," a group of "survivor" Templar alchemists in Scotland. Blanche may have given some of his secrets to her "PoS successor," Nicholas Flamel, whose sigils and diagrams in his published works resemble Poulain's. Flamel's brother worked for Jean de Berry. As you can see, all these people curiously interconnect.

(A group called the Freres-Aines was "re-established" in the 20th century by Daniel Caro, who called himself "Gaston Phoebus" after the original man who attempted to bring the Freres-Aines from Scotland to France at the behest of Cardinal Jean-Jacques D'Ossa, the future Pope John XXII, who was present at the Council of Vienne. One of the few places the story of the original Freres-Aines can be found is in Gaetan Delaforge's book on the Templar tradition; "Delaforge" (a pseudonym) was a member of the Solar Temple.)

In 1446, the cornerstone for Rosslyn Chapel was laid. The history of Rosslyn and the Sinclairs who were its lords since the 1280s - they appear to have inherited it from the French de Roscelin family - is like many other things, highly disputed. The Sinclairs claim to be descended from the Norman Santo-Claros ("Clear Light") of St.-Clair-sur-Epte. The "prieure documents" also claim that Hugh de Payns married one Catherine St. Clair, thus establishing a Sinclair presence in the Templars from early on. Finally, they also claim the Sinclairs to have been the hereditary "patrons" of Scottish Freemasonry for several centuries. The implications are obvious; the "priory docs" present the Sinclairs as the "interface" between Templarism and Masonry.

1600-1780: The Cabal of the Devout

This appears to be an interesting time in the PoS saga, according to the "prieure documents". Apparently, at some point during this time period, the "old" Order de Sion faded from the scenes, but it seems to have transferred some of its ideas and personnel into the Order of St. Sulpice (Sulpicians), the Lazarists of St. Vincent de Paul, the Discalced Carmelites, and perhaps most particularly, a group lampooned by Moliere as a "cabal of the devout" - the Compagnie du St.-Sacrament. The "prieure documents" claim that the Compagnie, which history records primarily as a religious anti-Jansenist movement in France, actually were one of the primary agents behind the "Fronde" against King Louis (and, moreso, his closest advisor Cardinal Mazarin). They claim that they were supporting the Guise-Lorraine families' bid for the throne, and that the man today known as Nostradamus may have been providing "timetables" for the action of the conspirators.

One thing that seems to have made the PoS so angry was Louis XIV's decision, carried out by Colbert, to give France a new national Meridian, based on the observatory in Paris, as calculated by the astronomer Cassini. "Le Serpent Rouge" and other "prieure documents" maintain that in fact, France already had a far older N-S meridian known as the "roseline," and that all Colbert and Cassini did was move it to the wrong place. This roseline or "serpent rouge" seems to have run through several hermetic churches in France, including St. Sulpice in Paris, the Lady of the Roses cathedral in Rodez, St. Vincent's in Carcasonne, and the Church of St. Stephen's in Bourges. Most importantly, it also ran through Rennes-les-Bains, whose name itself comes from Rhedae or Rhodos, meaning "roses". A more romantic line used for its time-telling, geomantic, religious significance was replaced with a much more staid line for travel and commerce.

They seem to have been concerned about this, because in the 1750's in St. Sulpice a copper line was drawn in the floor, and a gnomon or meridian marker installed, as if to remind people that it was once a meridian church. The Sulpicians themselves took their name from Sulpicius, a bishop of Bourges in Merovingian times. Curiously, they themselves went on to found the city of Montreal in Canada, and there they erected a Notre Dame cathedral in the 'geomantic' center of the city. Their symbol, two crossed M's, seems to turn up in other "hermetic" contexts. Another group the "PoS" seems to have been involved with during this time, according to the "prieure documents", were the Essene and Cathar-like Camisards, known for their white shirts of purity and holiness.

During this time, the painter Poussin is active, as is another painter, David Teniers the Younger (he is the 2nd - his father and his son were also both David Teniers). This is important, as their names will turn up later. Poussin is said to have known a great "secret" which he refused to reveal. There are those who say his painting "Shepherds of Arcadia" depicts an actual tomb, the so-called "Poussin Tomb", in the RlC area.

 

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Who remembers Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello)? On a trip to the Holy Land, he met a street vendor of antiquities who sold him "the bill from the Last Brunch."

"Shameful," he said. "Look at this: 12 Eggs Benedict and one soft-boiled egg, yet they split the check 13 ways."

 

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1781 - 1901: The Rose-Croix

1781 - 1901: The Rose-Croix

It is during this time that the PoS and the RlC sagas begin to overlap, at least according to the "prieure documents". In 1781, Marie Negre d'Hautpoul, a resident of Rennes-les-Chateau died. Her family had been involved in Memphis-Misraim and Martinist Freemasonry. What happened after seems to be in dispute (as always), but the "prieure documents" suggest that her confessor, the Abbe Bigou, moved a meridian marker with the words "Et in Arcadia Ego" from a tomb elsewhere on the "roseline" (some say this is the "Arques" or Pontils Tomb which supposedly appears in Poussin's painting) to her gravesite, and then erected a second tombstone with an odd inscription on it. This inscription is apparently a cipher, and even contains Bigou's own name on it. Bigou also supposedly writes two ciphered parchments and has them buried along with other documents (including geneaologies and a Hautpoul "testimony") in his church in RlCÖ to be discovered two hundred years later, after the chaos of the French Revolution.

In the early 1800's, Charles Nodier and Victor Hugo organize a literary salon at the Arsenal Library where Nodier worked, known as the Cenacle. Nodier and Hugo were good friends, and are listed by the "prieure documents" as successive PoS grandmasters. I believe the Cenacle represents the earliest traceable root of the 'real' or 'modern' PoS, which I think began as a 19th century society of Romantics, artists, surrealists, and Symbolists who may or may not have had any real (more likely, it was indirect) connection to the earlier OdS, and who adopted "Et in Arcadia Ego" as their properly elegiac and romantic motto. It is possible that the librarian Nodier may have discovered a number of key texts in the Arsenal library, such as Flamel's translated texts. As for Hugo, he dabbled heavily in Spiritualism and arcana, and he is now an "ascended master" in the Vietnamese religion Cao Dai.

After Hugo, the "prieure documents" claim that the next "grand master" of the "PoS" was Claude Debussy, the composer. Once again, Debussy seems like an unlikely candidate for such a role, but digging into his biography suggests otherwise. Debussy was introduced to Josephin Peladan's Rose-Croix through his friend Erik Satie (and Satie emerges as the bridge between Debussy, Cocteau, and Picasso). Through the Rose-Croix, whose members also included the opera singer Emma Calve, Georges "Count Israel" Monti (mentor of a man who will emerge later, Pierre Plantard), and Eliphas Levi, Debussy may have come to meet the Sulpician scholar Emile Hoffet, and more importantly, another man, Berenger Sauniere.

I will not go into great detail over the Sauniere saga here, as there are other sites which do it far more thoroughly and comprehensively. What Sauniere did or did not do or find is in dispute. He became the parish priest of Rennes-les-Chateau in 1885, and after living through a period of initial extreme deprivation, started displaying a bizarre ostentatious display of sudden wealth. He came under suspicion, was defrocked by the church in 1912, and died in 1917. However, there are two myths about his death that need to be put to rest. He did not die on January 17th, and his coffin was ordered six months before his death (not 5 days). Many also say that Father Riviere, his confessor, denied him last rites and that his funeral was somewhat bizarre. The "prieure documents" claim that Sauniere found Bigou's hidden parchments in 1891, and with Hoffet's help, deciphered the ciphers (encoded within two excerpts from the Gospels). These two ciphers are, of course, legendary at this point. The first said, quite simply:

THIS TREASURE BELONGS TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION AND HE IS THERE DEAD.

The second said:

SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION THAT POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY PEACE 681 BY THE CROSS AND THIS HORSE OF GOD I DESTROY THIS DAEMON GUARDIAN AT MIDDAY. BLUE APPLES.

Who composed these ciphers is also in dispute, although I agree with my friend Ted Cranshaw that evidence suggests they were generated in the 18th century, and in all likelihood by the Abbe Bigou, not by modern pranksters (i.e. the Marquis de Cherisey). The last one must be deciphered by using a knight's tour of the chessboard, along with the de Vigenere substitution technique. Interestingly, the key for the cipher, "MORT EPEE", comes from the Marie de Negre tombstone, whose entire 128-letter text is a perfect anagram for the ciphertext, minus 14 extraneous letters.

It is claimed that the second cipher refers to three paintings, Poussin's Shepherds of Arcadia, Teniers' Temptation of St. Anthony, and a portrait of Celestine V, all of which Sauniere supposedly went to view at the Louvre during a trip to Paris. (This trip is, like so many other matters, disputed.) The cipher would seem to indicate that these two artists "hold the key," but while some think they know the significance of the Poussin reference (it supposedly points to the "Pontils Tomb"), the importance of Teniers' painting is not clear (he did about five Temptations, each slightly different from the others). However, of the paintings of Teniers that I have been able to see, there seems to be an interesting obscure symbolism that the artist associated with St. Anthony the Hermit - whose feast day is that recurring date, January 17th. As for the painting of Celestine V, its significance is also unknown, although Celestine is the only pope to have resigned his office: what Dante called "The Great Refusal". Incidentally, the Poussin painting appears as a relief, in reverse, at the Shugborough Hall Shepherds' Monument in England, along with a strange cipher beneath it which seems to be the initial letters of a verse from 18th century Romantic poetry.

Sauniere's church contains a daemon guardian, a statue of Asmodeus, and there are those who say that at noon an optical effect that looks like "blue apples" appears through the stained glass windows. There are those who say Sauniere's paymaster, and the "brains" of his operation, was Father Henri Boudet, the parish priest of Rennes-les-Baines. Boudet was a bit of a crank antiquarian who argued that the original language of the Celts, and the whole world, was English. However, Le Vraie Langue Celtique, his "nut book", contains a number of puns, anagrams, and codesÖ as do the tombs he created for Jean Vie and Paul-Vincent de Fleury. The "prieure documents" seem to hint that Boudet was a PoS operative, and that he located a meridian marker in the RlC region.

1901 - 2000: The PoS Comes into Closer View

Some "prieure documents" suggest Sauniere was loosely connected to a type of aristocratic and Hermetic Freemasonry (despite his being a priest) known as the Hieron du Val d'Or. There seems to be a hint that the Hieron was the "guise" of the "PoS" during that time period. From what people have written about it, the Hieron seems to have been an 'esoteric research center' located at Paray-le-Monial, "ground zero" of the Sacred Heart cult in France. It conducted research into Atlantis and esoteric Catholicism. The "prieure documents" also suggest that after Sauniere's death, the surrealist artist/poet/filmmaker Jean Cocteau became "GM" of the PoS in 1918. Interestingly, right around the same time, Cocteau seems to have partnered with Satie and Picasso on a production (Picasso's work was dominated by PoS-type esoteric themes), and then he and Satie went on to form a musical composing group, "Le Six," that were based on improvisation from Debussy's work. The link between these two "GM"s was Erik Satie.

During the late 1930s and 1940s, which was the period of the Vichy Occupation of France, a young man known only as "Pierre de France," aka Pierre Plantard, aka Plantard de St.-Clair, began publishing a journal called Vaincre, which issued from a group calling itself Alpha Galates. Vaincre's writers included a number of esoteric and political figures. It states that the goals of Alpha Galates were a European federation/union centered on France, the unity of France within its own borders, and a revived chivalry and patriotic feeling. Vaincre also carried stories that were anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic; when asked about this by authors Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh, Plantard simply said that he had to run stories of that type in order to get it past the Gestapo - really, he and Poirer Murat were actually sending message to the Maquis or Resistance. In 1943, he claims he was interned at Fresnes for Resistance activity. The Resistance seems to have appreciated Plantard's efforts, because he was tapped by General de Gaulle to help organize some of the Paris Committees of Public Safety which were involved in de Gaulle's return to power.

Of course, others insist Plantard was not on the side of the angels during the war, but like his associate Francois Mitterand, who visited RlC in 1981, he was actually an active Vichy collaborator, and part of the Vichy's Uriage-based "educational movement" to turn the youth of France against modernity and progress. There are even accusations that he used Nazi connections to obtain esoteric documents from Martinists and others. As with other matters, figuring out whose side Plantard during WW II was on seems hard to do. The Gestapo under Klaus Barbie in Lyon was infilitrating, dissolving, and even murdering members of esoteric organizations during the Vichy Occupation. Martinist Constant Chevillon was killed when he fell into a "Synarchic" trap set by members of the Fraternite des Polaires, who were connected to the excavations that SS man Otto Rahn was doing in the South of France, looking for the treasure of Montsegur and/or the Grail.

One thing is certain about Msr. Plantard: his geneaology as presented in the "dossiers secretes" appears to be an utter fabrication. And, whatever relationship he wanted to present to the Sinclairs of Rosslyn, he only added the particle "de St. Clair" to his name in 1964. Plantard claims that in 1946, he left Alpha Galates and was inducted into the PoS by the Abbe Francois Ducaud-Bourget. However, there are similarities between Alpha Galates and the PoS, especially in apparent organizational structure, which suggest some other relationship. One also finds a strange semblance between the PoS "statutes" and the degrees and principles of the Rectified Scottish Rite in France (an outgrowth of the Templar Strict Observance) as well as the Memphis-Misraim branch of Masonry. Plantard may have been introduced to these rites by the Mason Camille Savoire.

Who was in charge between Cocteau's death in 1963 and Plantard's claimed accession in 1981 is not clear, but various sources suggest it was either Ducaud-Bourget, Catholic rightist Marcel Lefebvre, or some sort of triumvirate involving Plantard, an Italian (Merzagora), and an American banker (Gaylord Freeman, from Chicago First National). The "prieure documents" suggest there was a "schism" within the PoS in 1956, between some sort of "Anglo-American contingent" (apparently rightists connected to the Knights of Malta) and the main group. Whatever this "schism" was, it led the schismatics to register the group and its statutes with the French bureau of organizations, giving people their first traceable existence of the group in this year. Plantard claims he healed the "schism" and reunited the group. During this time (1961-1978), his associates began depositing the mysterious "prieure documents" (all having to do with treasure, Rennes-les-Chateau, Merovingians, white queens, and hidden secrets) in the Biblioteque Nationnale, under pseudonyms like "Anthony the Hermit".

Plantard claims that he was made Grand Master of the PoS on January 17th, 1981 (up until that time, he was merely its Secretary-General), coincidentally enough close to the time around which Holy Blood Holy Grail was published. But his term did not last long. In 1984, in an interview published in Messianic Legacy, he told the authors Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh that certain "maneouvres" by his "Anglo-American" brethren could no longer be put up with, and that he was resigning. He died in February of this year (2000), and there are those who say that the PoS, which was his own creation, or at least became his cult of personality, ceased to exist in 1984. Certainly, all there has been since 1984 is speculation about the group and who is running it. No one has stepped forward to give any more interviews. Some think the PoS is now operating in Barcelona, with a Catalan attorney as its current Grand Master.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Who remembers Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello)? On a trip to the Holy Land, he met a street vendor of antiquities who sold him "the bill from the Last Brunch."

"Shameful," he said. "Look at this: 12 Eggs Benedict and one soft-boiled egg, yet they split the check 13 ways."

I don't think I get it.

 

[sweetnpetite]

The many orders of Sion

The many orders of Sion
In 1099, Augustinian canons regular establish the Order of Notre Dame de Sion headquartered in the Abbey of Mt. Sion. An 1178 papal bull by Pope Alexander claims monasteries in Calabria, the Holy Land, Sicily, and elsewhere. Some of these monks appear to have established themselves in Orleans in 1152. This Order appears to have been absorbed into the Jesuits in either 1617 or 1619, but the main source for this remains, unfortunately, Gerard de Sede's 1988 "Les Impostures".
In 1393, Ferri de Vaudemont establishes a Confraternity of Our Lady of Sion in Nancy (the Lorraine, near Sion-Vaudemont). Its relationship to the earlier Order of Sion is unknown. If and when this order ceased to exist, I am unaware.
There appear to have been two Jacobite organizations in the 18th/19th century that used this name: the Realm of Sion, founded in the 1740s, whose leader at one point was the bishop of Rodez, and which claimed descent from a 16th century order dedicated to Thomas Beckett; and a second organization, The Sovereign Sacred Religious and Military Order of Knights Protectors of the Sacred Sepulchre of Our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Most Holy Temple of Zion, founded in New Zealand in 1848.
Only one Order of Notre Dame de Sion actually appears in the Catholic Encyclopedia, and it is the Congregation of Notre Dame de Sion, founded by Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne in Paris in 1843. This organization has parochial schools in the United States and France. One of its main goals is to convert Jews to Catholicism.
In the mid-1800s, a Czech author, Prokop Chochosoulek, wrote a work, The Templars of Bohemia. It was a work of "historical fiction". However, he does mention a Priory of Sion being behind the creation of the Templars. His reference seems to indicate they still existed in his own time.
From 1807 to 1817, the Russian mystic and Martinist I.V. Lopukhin edited a Martinist journal called The Messenger of Sion, which dealt with a variety of Jewish and mystical themes.
Although never identifying itself as an order of "Sion", an organization formed by the priestly Brothers Baillard, Eugene Michel Vintras (otherwise known as "Elias the Artist", whose mentor was a Madam Bouche who lived near St. Sulpice and went by "Sister Salome"), and the Abbe Joseph Boullan known as the Church of Carmel tried to create a syncretistic Celtic-Christian pilgrimage center at Sion-Vaudemont in the 1850s

Please excuse the long posts, I'm putting these posts up for anyone who's interested, if you are not, just ignore them. the reason I didn't just post a simple link is that there is a bunch of different stull on this page and it's all mixed in. this is all for information purposes only and isn't meant to imply that I agree or disagree w/ any thing found within, lol.

 

[sweetnpetite]

In Quest of the Grail

In Quest of the Grail
His disciples asked of Him, "Master, when will the Kingdom come?" And He answered them, saying:
"It will not come by waiting and watching for it. Be wary of those who say, 'Look, here it is,' or 'Look, there it is.' Because my Father's Kingdom is spread out upon the Earth, and people do not see it."
The Gospel of Judas Thomas the Twin, verse 113



To that inspired reader who has followed me diligently through each twist and turn of my argument to arrive at this juncture -- the stepping off point of the last lap of our mystical marathon -- it must seem that we have been navigating a great Labyrinth. Together, we have sought the Center of this Labyrinth, this thing of which we feel, with a sense of compelling immediacy, that all of our souls are a part. Many are those of our initial company, I am sure, who have not reached this point because they simply cannot comprehend why the path to the Center needs to be so circuitous, why it seems so incessantly to swerve back and forth along tangents rather than to proceed directly to the Heart of the Matter. And for those who, perhaps despite the same misgivings, have persevered in this Quest of ours, it is doubtless still not very clear where the "Heart of the Matter" lies... much less what we will find when we get there.

While remaining painfully aware of what we don't know, however, we surely cannot be said to be merely groping our way toward the Center, with only a blind faith as our guide. If we seek the Heart of the Matter, we do so, by now, with a certain awareness of what that Heart signifies. It has a significance which embraces the iconography of Mary's Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of Her Son, a significance which speaks to an Indwelling Glory which does not stand above and separate from the universe of Matter, but rather abides most deeply within it, rendering it Sublime. It is as if the Hearts of the Mother and Son are the two poles of a great spiritual magnet, which does not merely descend into the realm of material things -- and lie there concealed in its chaos -- but vitally and totally transforms Matter itself into something Divine, weaving its discordant fibers into a resplendent Wedding Garment.

All of this merely reiterates what we already know. But there is something further, something absolutely crucial and indispensable, which we are obliged to consider now in this, the windup of our metaphysical tour: This marvelous transformation, this divinization of the material universe, as Teilhard de Chardin conceived it, is not and cannot be the work of either the Son or the Mother alone. That is to say, the supernal magnetism which compels the sundry particles of Being to align themselves to its field -- this magnetism is necessarily a force which proceeds from the Male and the Female together. Such a radical proposition as this one compels us to re-think a whole host of assumptions which underlie much of mankind's religious thinking. And as we reconsider these assumptions, we will begin to realize that they form the crux, the axis of a body of Falsehood which has been furtively assembling itself over the past two thousand years.

We have discussed dualism, a heresy which seeks to divide Matter and Spirit and which ultimately leads to the conclusion that there is not one God but two -- one of whom is the malignant creator of an utterly hellish material universe. We have reviewed various prophetic intimations foreshadowing a false Messiah, the False Christ whose teaching will be rooted in a form of this dualistic heresy. Like the storied Hydra, dualism has many heads, a number of which it has reared up over the course of centuries past. As we survey some of these "severed heads" -- those of the Manichees, Gnostics, Templars, Cathars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons -- we may be tempted to eye their unsavory remains as the gestating embryo of the ultimate Man of Sin. But we err gravely and disastrously if we yield to this temptation..

This is because, as prophecy informs us, the Hydra of dualism has yet to rear what is by far its most subtle and seductive head -- one which will spawn no mere heretical sect, but will form the basis of a Universal Church in which the major religions of the World will, for a time, merge. What is this more subtle form of dualism, and why will it be so irresistibly seductive? To answer those questions, we must proceed as spiritual physicians, examining the collective Body of Man for signs of the onset of a deadly malady. When we do so, we find the most obvious symptoms of pathology all radiating from one telltale source -- human sexuality. From the very beginning of this eschatological inquiry of ours, we have identified, as a principal cause of the deepening crisis of Faith in modern times, the pathetic incapacity of the Roman Papacy to deal with the "problem" of Man's sexual nature.

This incapacity is no merely fortuitous, unfortunate shortcoming, but is the inevitable epiphenomenon -- the accompanying fever, if you will -- of infection by the virus of dualism. Like any virus, this one is capable of mimicking Life without actually partaking of it. A virus is the sterile monad which monotonously replicates itself, while Life proliferates in a myriad of ramifications, just as does the Tree, its archetype. Flowing through the stem of Creation, the sap of Life thrusts its branches in all directions... and yet always toward the Center, which surrounds and embraces it. And when we speak of Life on this Earth, we do not speak of anything which is distinct or different from Life Eternal, because the same Tree of Life extends from its roots in our hallowed soil (which is the dust of our ancestors) to the uppermost mansions of Heaven.

This line of thinking leads us inexorably to the principle that nothing which truly belongs to Life is alien to God. We can no more speak of Life without the Male and the Female than we can speak of the Ocean without water. It follows, then, that the sexual nature of Life is a reflection of the sexual nature of God, and that Male and Female are spiritual, as well as biological, attributes.

It's significant that, historically, dualists have always taken one of two approaches toward sexuality. Some, like the medieval Bogomils (whose name gives us the term "bugger"), wantonly indulged every conceivable carnal appetite based on the conviction that Man's "animal nature" belongs to a plane of reality totally cut-off from the "spiritual". Since no degree of degradation of the Flesh, no matter how extreme, could possibly taint the Spirit -- so they believed -- such degradation is the proper expression of contempt for all things of the Flesh. We can easily discern that this viewpoint is not a bit different from that of the ascetic, who denies himself the slightest enjoyment of the "animal" pleasures, seeking to "mortify" (i.e., "deaden") the Flesh. And in history we find strict asceticism as the alternate accommodation to sexuality on the part of some dualists, the Cathars among them.

While the modern Church hierarchy by no means eschews asceticism -- the Opus Dei crowd is quite big on "mortification" -- they don't prescribe it as the only road to salvation either. After all, the Pope is a temporal sovereign as well as a spiritual leader, and it doesn't do much for a sovereign's long-term prospects if his subjects stop copulating. Consequently, with the reassuring, if dead, hand of Aristotle resting on their shoulder, the Pontiffs of Rome have taken a quite utilitarian posture regarding sex -- acknowledging that certain otherwise-unedifying behavior must be occasionally sanctioned for the sake of procreation. For the sake of procreation alone -- this teaching implies -- we are Male and Female, with our true spiritual nature presumed to be androgynous, like that of the Angels.

If there are androgynous Angels, however, they are most assuredly those of the Fallen variety, because without the energizing magnetism of the sexual poles there is neither Life nor ascent toward the Godhead. We are created Male and Female -- both natures present within each of us, as they were within our first father Adam -- that we may enjoy a spiritual conjugation with Our Creator. We envision our deities in the bipolar format of Father/Husband/Son and Mother/Bride/Sister, not because of our need to translate transcendent things into a familiar framework, but as a precise visceral perception of the fundamental structure of ultimate Reality.

Our one road back to the bosom of Our Lord lies not in the overcoming of our sexual nature, but in its apotheosis. That is the true nature of the Wedding which awaits us in the Resurrection of the Body.

As my reader surely has already surmised, the true Quest of the Grail comprises the final path to this Divine conjugation, the last portal through which we pass on our way to the embrace of our most beloved Bridegroom, who is Christ. Since we are to become one with Him in the Body, can there be any doubt but that His embrace will be not merely sexual, but the ultimate refinement and quintessence of sexuality? And if we are to enter into this Sublime union with Him, if we are to be His Bride, must we not only be One among each other, but, first and foremost, One within ourselves?

Our Lord's principal mission in entering this World as an incarnate Man was to establish His Church as the vehicle for attaining the Oneness of humanity, which is the precondition of His return. Accordingly, our Quest of the Grail cannot proceed without reference to the Church, cannot proceed without engaging Her both in Her purest ideal -- corresponding to the archetype of the Blessed Virgin -- and in Her fallen and degraded state of harlotry in history. As the Virgin, She lovingly guides Her children toward the fulfillment of their spiritual destiny, but as the Whore, she blocks the way to their salvation and, ultimately, offers them up in abominable sacrifice to her procurer, the Prince of this World.

I am certain my reader has some acquaintance with the romantic literature of the Grail which vividly portrays the treachery and danger attendant upon the pursuit of that glittering icon. And here we begin to descry the source of this deadly peril, because in this selfsame path to Our Lord, we must inevitably encounter -- within ourselves -- His most bitter and implacable rival. Before we drink from the golden Cup of our celestial Wedding feast, we must first drain the gall of another cup -- the envenomed blood of a dynasty founded by our great-uncle Cain. To the ultimate scion of that damned lineage, prophecy informs us, the Church-cum-Whore must first be joined in a calamitous tryst -- a tryst destined to be "uncovered" in the impending Apocalypse.

 

[sweetnpetite]

The Dynasty of the Beast

The Dynasty of the Beast

If St. Malachy's epithet "the Eclipse of the Sun" means anything at all, it indelibly marks the Pontiff whom it describes as a bellwether of sorts, destined to lead his flock in the most profound shadows of spiritual opacity. It is as though the final scenes enacted by the erstwhile Polish actor are meant to set the stage for the much-anticipated entrance of the Persona around whom the entire drama of human history revolves. Throughout its length, the skein of Time fairly bristles with intimations of His Coming, as if the World were His shroud unraveling before our eyes. Considerably more difficult to fathom, however, is the provenance of His antagonist -- the Man of Sin -- whose sinister approach signals to us less in our dreams and visions than in the instinctive wrenching of our viscera. It is not so much that he comes upon us from our blind side, as that he is our blind side, the product of our truncated humanity. Like an amputated limb, he causes us pain while remaining inaccessible to our will.

Because temporal existence is a transient bifurcation of nullity, its only operative principle is symmetry. Therefore, if the World has been preparing itself for the Advent of the Messiah these past six thousand years, then it must be true that it has equally -- albeit more covertly -- been readying itself for the parousia of Antichrist. This helps explain why the panorama of human existence presents to us such a pitiable and disgraceful spectacle of inequity and gratuitous malice. Yet we are given this spectacle to observe, not that it may break our spirit with its relentless indifference, but that we might, at long last, recognize the abominable lineaments of Falsehood and separate ourselves from them.

How do we set about to do this?

Our predicament resembles that of the mythical hero trapped in the Labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur. Like Theseus, we must find the end of the magical thread somewhere close at hand if we are to have any hope of following it out of the maze. And this is precisely where our bellwether Pope becomes so useful to us, because the trajectory of his exit from this World must merge, at some point, with the route of Antichrist's entry -- just as the circuits of the Sun and Moon must cross during an eclipse. From this point of occlusion -- if we can detect it -- might it not be possible to grasp the end of a "thread" traceable back to its origins? Let us see.

During his travels during the autumn of 1996, the Pope cut a rather controversial path across the Nation of France -- the "eldest daughter of the Church" -- where he made two particularly intriguing stops. Arriving first in Tours, one of the most popular pilgrimage sites of the Middle Ages, he celebrated the 1600th anniversary of the death of St. Martin -- who argued in vain against the Church's first resort to murder as a means of silencing heresy. From there Il Papa proceeded to Rheims, the ancient coronation site of French monarchs, to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, the Frankish king whose fabled bloodline -- we already know -- is so strangely enmeshed with the esoteric traditions of the Holy Grail.

That the Polish Pontiff -- a tough, pragmatic man, if nothing else -- should place his frail health at risk only weeks prior to what the Vatican would evasively label an "appendectomy" -- this clearly signaled to the World that something important was afoot. That he should further provoke a firestorm of outrage in what is surely the most proudly secular Nation on earth -- to this we can only ascribe the force of a divine mandate. From whence could such a mandate come? And from whom? Above the Bishop of Rome, the Church recognizes no higher temporal authority, and in its dogma no living mortal surpasses the spiritual authority which rests on the head which wears the tiara. Even as we pose these questions we begin to experience an eerie foreboding, as if we have begun to open the door to a long-sealed closet inhabited by ancestral ghosts -- not all of them friendly!

As usual we are, Janus-like, compelled to look backward to see forward. To make our task easier, our bellwether Pontiff has led us to Clovis, founder the Gallic Nation's first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. A traditional story (but one strongly supported by genealogy) traces the bloodline of Clovis to the royal house of Priam, the first of the great kings of the Gentiles -- the kings with whom the Church has, from the time of Constantine, committed fornication. Ultimately, this genealogical trail leads us back to an ancestor named Antenor, a Scythian ruler of the 5th Century before Christ.(1)

At the time Antenor reigned, the Scythians were plundering nomadic horsemen of the Asian steppes -- the land from which prophecy suggests the Destroyer himself will come. Such masterful brigands they were, in fact, that a series of ancient wars were fought over naval access to their trading ports on the eastern side of the Black Sea. Whoever dominated the heights above the narrow straits of the Dardanelles controlled the flow of the golden booty, and the Trojans' success in commanding the strategic passage brought them unrivaled wealth -- along with nearly continuous assaults on their stronghold, culminating in the successful Greek siege immortalized in Homer's epic.

My reader is familiar with the basic story of the Trojans and may even recall that something called the Palladium figures prominently in the plot. The Palladium is one of those objects, like the Grail, which defy description. From the bits of quantum physics which I have (I fear) force-fed my reader, he/she will perhaps associate this state of indeterminacy and ambivalence with the condition of the prima materia, i.e. Matter uninformed by Consciousness. Onto this subtextual layer of the formless, the ineffable One holographically imprints the contours of His Mind, and thus conceives the Son, the Word Made Flesh. The Kabbalists call this primal realm Malkuth, a precinct at once most holy and most profane, a place where Heaven and Earth and the Abyss touch one another. To the ancient priestesses of Athena -- the pagan personification of Logos -- the Palladium was a sacred stone which the goddess had cast down from Mt. Olympus, and in that sense it resembles the Scriptural stone which Jacob consecrated at Bethel to mark the "ladder" connecting Heaven and Earth.(2)

According to the Iliad, the hidden cause of the calamitous fall of Troy lay in the treacherous theft of the Palladium from its temple sanctuary. After the death of Paris, Priam sent his closest advisor to the Greeks to see if a peace could be arranged involving the return of the now-widowed Helen. The king's trusted emissary was none other than Antenor -- eponymous ancestor of our proto-Merovingian king Antenor of Scythia -- but instead of offering the Greeks Helen, which would have removed the pretext of their attack, Antenor offered them Troy itself, on the condition that he be crowned the new ruler of the conquered city and receive half of Priam's treasure. Such a betrayal -- while it resonates emphatically with the vile spirit of our own age -- in the classical world brought down the unending wrath of the ancestral Furies.

In the chansons de geste of medieval romance -- the genre which spawned the legends of the Grail Quest -- the name Antenor became synonymous with Judas, and Dante even labeled a province in the deepest pit of Hell -- the Ninth Circle of the Traitors -- Antenora in his "honor".(3) With the complicity of Antenor, the Greeks snatched the Palladium, and the city it had so long protected fell -- its noblemen all put to the sword, save only the two who had betrayed their own people: Antenor, the ancestor of Clovis, and Aeneas, the founder of Rome. As a sign to the marauding troops that Antenor was to be spared from the general slaughter, the Greeks draped over his door a leopard skin -- the same emblem by which we have come to recognize the Beast of Revelation.

Unlike the Greeks, the people of Ilium and its environs -- the Phrygians -- were a matriarchal culture whose religion revolved around a great Mother goddess, symbolically represented by the queen bee. Originally a benevolent Earth deity associated with fertility and nurturing, the Phrygian goddess became progressively transformed into a terrifying banshee whose worship demanded the emasculation and dismemberment of her priest-consorts. This hideous metamorphosis of the antediluvian "Great Goddess" was mirrored among the other ancient societies of the Mediterranean as they became submerged in the Arian Age of warfare and the culture of Death which it spawned.

Various mythical renderings of this transmogrification of the goddess were compiled by the Roman poet Ovid during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Finding Ovid's depiction of the depravity of the pagan deities to be a "corrupting" influence on Roman youth, Caesar had the poet banished from Rome, and Augustan culture instead conferred its laurels on Virgil, who had conveniently recast the Trojan traitor Aeneas -- Rome's founding father -- as a hero. Among the tales in his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells of how the gentle matriarch of the Trojans, Queen Hecuba, was transmuted, after the brutal annihilation of her entire family, into a rabid bitch -- the infernal Hecate, goddess of Death incarnate.(4)

On the archetypal level, Ovid was portraying the effect of two thousand years of continuous warfare on human consciousness -- a traumatic, radical dissociation of the Male and Female principles of the psyche, with the latter exiled into the darkest recesses of fear and abomination. Gone was the all-giving, all-enduring Mother, and in her stead enshrined the ravenous she-wolf who devours her own young. Into the place of the loving companion and Bride stepped the tyrannical Queen Bee, who castrates and disembowels her unlucky consort. It is axiomatic that Man's separation from God must finally lead to his separation from himself: In union with the Male, the Female principle is the source of Life, but in scission she is the angel of Death.

For the Male principle, the consequences of this fission are even more dire. Divided from the feminine source of its activating energy, the masculine Will is mortally wounded, maimed, rendered impotent. No longer capable of true Desire, the Will becomes infected with concupiscence, and the Male principle undergoes an archetypal metamorphosis of its own -- becoming the lecherous Satyr, the besotted Bacchus, the bestial Centaur. Meanwhile, the blockage of Affect from acting through the Will forces the irrepressible Female energy to find other outlets, manifesting itself in the ubiquitous compulsions and phobia which paralyze the Will, even in its own domain.

Ironically, the exile and demonization of the Female principle proves to be its salvation, because, while terribly disfigured, it nonetheless survives as a collective entity. Hence we can still speak of a Collective Unconscious, which all humans share -- but can we speak of a Collective Will? Alas, no longer in any human sense. Sadly, we are forced to acknowledge the death of the Male principle as a component of collective Man and its irretrievable disintegration into the individual Will, ruled by that malign spirit of pride and envy which distinguishes Satan.

In the parlance of the Grail Legend, this mortal wounding of the Male principle is known as the "Dolorous Stroke" -- an injury that the "Maimed" or "Fisher" King inflicts upon himself with the Lance of Longinus, which dispatched Our Lord at Calvary and constitutes one the four Grail Hallows. Though sufficient to incapacitate the King, the Dolorous Stoke is not immediately deadly, and the wounded monarch limps about, spending most of his time "fishing". From this perspective, then, it must strike us as a very odd "coincidence" indeed that the Merovigian descendants of Clovis were called les Rois fainéants -- the lethargic Kings!

As the Arian Age of the "hero" drew to a close, Mankind was in extremis, its Male principle hopelessly eviscerated and its Female nature banished to the dark night side of Consciousness. The reflexive concupiscence and violence which had supplanted the Will now turned to the relentless pursuit of the elusive Female -- and we find this pursuit also rendered as a recurring theme in classical mythology. Once again we turn to Ovid, the "politically incorrect" poet of Imperial Rome, for his account of the maiden Proserpina's abduction at the hands of Pluto, the baleful Ruler of the Underworld.(5)

The tale begins with the maid's mother, Ceres, goddess of the Earth's fertility, mounting her flying dragon-drawn chariot to search for her missing daughter. In Sicily, Ceres pauses to take a drink from a mountain spring called Arethusa -- Greek for "the Water Pourer" (which also denominates the constellation Aquarius). As the goddess draws her draught, the stream begins to speak to her of having spotted her lost child in the Underworld. Deducing that the abductor must therefore be the lascivious Pluto, her equal in the ranks of the gods, Ceres dismisses any designs of outfacing the tyrant of the Dead in his own den, but elects instead to retaliate by making the entire Earth fruitless and barren -- a desolate landscape matching the Wasteland to which the realm of the Maimed King is reduced in the Grail Legend. This stratagem quickly restores to Ceres her daughter, and soon thereafter, the Mother returns to Sicily to thank Arethusa, and to inquire how the maiden had come to assume the form of a stream.

Arethusa relates how, as a virgin companion of the lunar goddess Diana, she had one day been bathing alone in an Arcadian stream called the Alpheius -- the same sacred river Alph which the poet Coleridge describes as flowing down into a "sunless sea" (i.e. the Underworld). As she bathed, she heard the voice of the river god and, sensing that he was ravishing her, fled from his embraces -- but the sight of her nakedness as she ran from him only fanned the flames of his ardor. At length no longer able to endure the chase, Arethusa called upon her patroness Diana, who transformed her into a stream. The lubricous Alpheius was not so easily discouraged, however, and, morphing himself back into a river, began to mix his waters with those of Arethusa. To evade his ruttish favors, she dove deep into the Earth, so far down that she reached the Underworld -- hence her knowledge of Proserpina's whereabouts -- and then resurfaced again in Sicily, where Ceres had encountered her.

Before proceeding further, let's step back for a moment to survey the path we have just traveled through the realms of myth. We observe that we have gone from Scythia to Troy, then to Arcadia, and now have landed in Sicily -- an itinerary remarkable for the fact that it exactly reproduces the legendary migrations of Clovis' ancestors, the Sicambrian Franks.(6) From this correspondence, we can postulate an association of the bloodline of Clovis with the archetypal figure which has led us along this track -- the Maimed King, symbol of the fatally wounded Will, the lapsed Male principle. In the Grail Legend, the Maimed King yearns for his own death, but he cannot be released from his suffering until his lineage spawns the Desired Knight, the hero who will complete the sacred Quest. This chosen Knight is to be recognized by his acquisition of all four of the Grail Hallows, which comprise, in addition to the Lance previously mentioned, a sword, a dish, and -- most precious of all -- the Cup of Our Lord's Last Supper. Before following the trail of the Merovingian bloodline any further, we must carefully probe the meaning concealed in these four relics.

 

[sweetnpetite]

The Grail Hallows

The Grail Hallows

Revealed Wisdom teaches us that, while the Eternal Kingdom is governed by the principle of Trinity, the temporal World is founded upon the Quaternity. Quaternity is intrinsic to the four Living Creatures -- Blake calls them the Four Zoas -- in the vision of Ezekiel, because it mathematically describes the imprint which the Word makes upon Flesh. Accordingly, in the great drama of Our Lord's Passion, we are not surprised to find that the sublime mementos which He left us are Four in number. For reasons which will become apparent later, I ask my reader to remember this sequence of numbers, from the spiritual plane to the material plane, represented respectively by the numbers Three and Four -- the Trinity of the Most High and the Quaternity of the World created in the image of the Word.

The archetypal meaning of the Lance of Longinus has already manifested itself to us: It is the instrument which fatally wounds the Fisher King ... and yet he cannot die. What is it that is mortal, but cannot die? From the impenetrable forests where the River Danube meets the Black Sea -- part of the migration route of Clovis' fabled ancestors -- come tales of the undead, the vampires of popular imagination. While the vampire must be classed with the witch and hobgoblin as a projection of the human psyche, however, that is not a cause for discounting it, because the quarry we are pursuing in this prophetic voyage of ours consists largely of such projections. The vampire is no less Real for the fact of its nonexistence: It haunts the collective Mind of Man precisely because it conjures up ancestral memories.

As the instrument which took the life of Our Savior, the Lance of Longinus is condemned to shed blood unceasingly. From the instant he pierced the side of Jesus with his weapon, the Roman centurion Gaius Longinus was struck blind, while the World fell into total darkness for three hours -- a pattern of events foreshadowing the three days of darkness which will precede Christ's return. In one version of the Grail Legend, the Fisher King is revived with the blood dripping from the Lance, much as the vampire of folklore is said to require the periodic replenishment of human gore. But before we rush to reduce the Maimed King to a one-dimensional fiend, we do well to remind ourselves that we are treading here on sacred ground -- such as that which Jacob consecrated at Bethel with his stone -- the hallowed precinct where the three levels of the Unapparent come together.

Besides the stone marker he placed at Bethel, Jacob set up another pillar at Gilead, to mark the outer boundary of the land which Yahweh had given to His beloved people. Until the coming of Christ, the realms beyond the pillar of Gilead -- the kingdoms of the Gentiles -- dwelt in spiritual darkness. It is worthwhile to draw a parallel between the two pillars established by Jacob at Bethel and Gilead and the twin pillars which betokened the Punic god Moloch and his Greek counterpart Hercules -- both consumers of innocent blood for the sake of their accursed immortality. We have come to view the duality of these figures as the hallmark of Set/Satan, i.e. the principle of spiritual opacity and division from the One. And now, in the course of our current discussion, we have followed the emanation of this infernal duplicity up "Jacob's ladder" to the level of the human soul, where it is mirrored in the radical breach between Male and Female.

Significantly, in the Grail Legend the pillar of Gilead imparts its name to the Desired Knight, Sir Galahad, whose worthiness to complete the Quest is founded upon his lineage. Galahad is descended from the House of David, i.e. the Royal House of Judah, which is identified in Old Testament prophecy as the pedigree of the Messiah:

And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.(7)

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.(8)

Implicit in the scriptural imagery of the flowering rod or Branch of the Davidic bloodline is an heraldic motif which extends also to the bloody Lance of the Grail Hallows. In a very real sense, the Chosen Knight possesses the Lance as a blazon of his Messianic pedigree. Further, since the various renderings of the Grail story all cast this Knight as a direct descendant of the Fisher King, the latter must himself be a scion of the royal House of David. When the medieval troubadours sang of the Fisher King as the keeper of the mystical Sangraal, therefore, they were also extolling him as the ancestral source of the Sang real -- the "royal blood", by virtue of which the last of his progeny would lay claim to the Messianic Kingship at the end of Time.

From my childhood days at St. Joseph's elementary school in Union City, New Jersey, I can still picture the Saint's statue cradling the infant Christ in one arm, while holding in the other a blossoming green branch. Since then I have seen countless similar depictions of Joseph bearing the branch which proclaims his place in the line of David -- the dynasty destined to bring forth the Messiah. But, according to symbolic usage, the flowering branch also signifies fertility, which begs the question: The fertility of whom? A father in the carnal sense may proudly display a symbol of his own virility when he carries his newborn son, but was Joseph the father of Jesus in the way of the Flesh? Mindful of the blessed virginity of his wife, we are at first inclined to deny this. Yet Christ had a human nature, and a human nature must be composed by the union of a man and a woman. If we are obsessed with the idea of virgin intacta, we can consider this union to have been transpiritual, but there remains the fact, as unequivocally reported by two of the Gospels,(9) that Joseph went on to father four more sons and several daughters after his Firstborn. There having been no intercession of the Holy Spirit in these later conceptions, we are left to conclude that Mary and Her husband were lovers in the most intimate natural sense.

The subject of an unspoken Church taboo, Mary's fecundity is sublimated into icons -- such as the May Queen, the Easter lily, and the rose -- but it is nonetheless at the core of Her nature and of the divinity of the Son born from Her womb: It is precisely because the Male and Female principles are perfectly fused in Christ that He is Divine. The source of this divinity informs His conquest of Death on the Cross, in which we find superimposed the vertical masculine line of the pillar and the horizontal feminine line of the sea. In view of this, we are left to wonder: If the image of St. Joseph's flowering branch so richly illuminates the mystery of the Our Redeemer's divine nature, might it not shed light as well upon the mystery of his abominable counterpart?

According to prophecy, the Man of Sin will convince the World that he is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of Man. In spite of his many other talents, however, the Deceiver cannot be divine. It follows, therefore, that he must persuade humanity that the Messiah need not be divine and -- as a necessary corollary -- that Jesus Himself was not divine. Those inclined toward conspiracy theories can easily find a common thread in all of the major "heresies" of past two thousand years: virtually all deny the divinity of Christ. Yet, the persistence and rampant proliferation of these heresies belies the notion that they are the product of petty human scheming. Like the rank weeds which sprout relentlessly even through concrete, the various avatars of the Arian heresy arise from the level beneath us -- the level which the Greeks and Romans called the Underworld -- the realm in which abide the spirits whose envy of the Son of Man caused them to be cast down.

Out of this same chthonian subreality once came a race of men, the posterity of Cain, who were, before the Flood, the masters of the Earth. Scripture reports them to have been a Titanic race, builders of great antediluvian cities and Cyclopean edifices, beside which the most ambitious architecture of the modern era shrinks to miniature scale. Indeed, the megalithic wonders of our ancient world (whose supposed fabrication by neolithic techniques is utterly ludicrous) are undoubtedly restorations of Cainite ruins.

Greek and Norse mythology are in accord with Genesis in describing this lost race of giants, accounted to have been peerless artificers of metal and stone, able to direct the movement of massive monoliths at will -- from which we may surmise that they had mastered some form of psychokinesis. This power eludes modern man because the division and atomization of his psyche renders it feeble and impotent -- like the Maimed King of Grail lore. In our era, the individual minds function -- at least on the conscious level -- more or less autonomously, like several billion small flashlights all pointed in different directions, producing only a diffuse glow. Based on their apparent psychokinetic powers, however, we must infer that the Cainites had a means of focusing mass Consciousness -- and perhaps unconscious impulses as well -- to do their bidding. Clearly, this technique would not have involved the melding of human minds in unconditional Love, which will be the foundation of the New Jerusalem, but rather the hierarchal ordering of collective psyche within the "architecture" of the consummate Temple of Worldliness.

Just as the geometry of certain crystals can produce coherent light, so there are definite proportions in Space/Time which can effect the integration of Consciousness. For the moment, we must defer detailed discussion of these principles, but a few observations are in order as they relate to our current topic. Epitomizing the hierarchal mental order of which we have been speaking is the Great Pyramid of Giza, which enshrines the proportion pi 3.14159... in the ratio of the perimeter of its base to its height. Similarly, in the dimensions of the great temples of Luxor and Karnak, we repeatedly encounter the so-called Golden Mean, phi 1.61803..., the self-replicating proportion by which all biological generation and growth proceeds. Consequently, the same esoteric knowledge which enabled the antediluvians to create an insect-like psychic unity would also have given them the key to vegetative and animal fertility -- the power to make even a lifeless staff or rod burst into luxurious flowers.

All of this brings us back to the mystical properties of the Grail Hallows, casting new meaning particularly on the power of the Chalice to restore fertility to the Wasteland. We begin to deduce that the Hallows constitute the remnants of a lost language of sorts, a system of hieroglyphs embodying a portion of the knowledge which survived the Flood. Is this knowledge the Gnosis from which the Hydra-headed heresies of history have sprung?

Mankind, St. Augustine teaches, is divided into two Cities, one of which was founded by the race of Cain. But if -- as Scripture attests -- Cain's progeny were extirpated in the Deluge, then how is that their City lives on and prospers? One response to this question -- the one which has tragically been given far too often in the past -- is to ascribe the survival of Cain's legacy to the sinister machinations of the various "secret societies" which pursue Hermetic wisdom. Again, one of the dangers here is that we tend to forget we are dealing with projections of forces which, in fact, lie within us. We can tell ourselves that we are not the children of Cain, but, if we are the children of Adam, then Cain is our brother. As such, he and his race, though now extinct, belong just as much as we do to the collective Body of Man, the Body which was One in our father Adam and will be One again in the new Adam, which is to say the Christ. This explains why the spirit of Cain must be born again in Antichrist at the end of Time, for without him mankind cannot become whole. Thus, even the coming of the Beast displays the working of the supreme Mercy of Our God for our salvation.

When the Man of Sin is finally revealed, he will begin to lose his attraction, and this is part of the meaning of the Apocalypse as an uncovering of what is now hidden. Until that time, however, the vestiges of his race will and must exert a strange magnetism on the human Imagination. Much of the lost civilization of the Cainites was buried deep beneath the oceans, where the passage of thousands of years has all but obliterated its traces. But, in the first few millennia after the Flood, their colossal submerged cities remained visible to mariners -- providing the stuff of ancient myths which tell of the vast underwater palaces of King Neptune and the cavernous stables of his horses. In some areas, such as North Africa and the Middle East, the former seabed became desert, and the Cyclopean citadels and temples of the antediluvians were interred beneath a sea of sand. As the dunes shifted, the ghostly outlines of these hypogea would sometimes reappear, engendering the wonderfully vivid body of Bedouin folklore, some of which is captured in the Arabian Nights, depicting immense underground cities of a lost race.

The people who had the best opportunity to explore the Cainite ruins and discover their secrets were the ancient Phoenicians, a mercantile breed of seafarers whose empire stretched from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. As we discussed in a previous section of this treatise, the Phoenicians worshiped Moloch, who was symbolized, like his Greek counterpart Hercules, by the twin pillars -- the very emblem we have now seen associated with the name of the Grail Knight Galahad. Moreover, according to both Hebrew and Hellenic sources, the antediluvians created two great pillars to preserve their esoteric knowledge from the coming cataclysm: In some versions the pillars are said to have been inscribed with hieroglyphs, while in others scrolls or tablets were reportedly hidden within or beneath them. In any case, it was from these pillars that Thoth -- the mythical architect of the Egyptian pyramids -- derived his science, and they were also the source from which the Greek Pythagoras formulated his metaphysical geometry based on the Golden Mean. Given this background, we cannot be blamed if we puzzle at the meaning of the two bronze pillars which guarded the entrance of the great Temple of King Solomon. Of all the Millenarian themes we have surveyed thus far, none has figured as centrally as that of the Temple of Jerusalem -- and we are about to encounter it again, right in the middle of the Grail enigma.

 

[sweetnpetite]

The Temple of Solomon

The Temple of Solomon

When King Solomon undertook to build the first Temple, he aspired to rival the most resplendent monuments of the pagan world. Accordingly, he dispatched his envoys to the wealthiest monarch of the Mediterranean, the Phoenician King Hiram of Tyre, to ask of him a crew of his most accomplished artisans and a renowned Master builder to direct their efforts. It so happened that Hiram received this request about the time when his workmen had just completed the construction of a magnificent temple in the city of Byblos dedicated to the goddess Astarte, who was the Phoenician equivalent of Venus. Following the pattern we described earlier, Astarte had degenerated from a benevolent agrarian goddess of fertility to the apotheosis of the most wanton and depraved sensuality. Her worship, like that of her Phrygian epiphany Cybele, involved the annual sacrificial death of a pubescent boy -- the chosen lover of the voracious diva -- and the dismemberment of his body as means of fructifying the land. The victim of this bloody ritual was named Adonis, and his death was followed by a ceremonial "resurrection" through which he achieved "immortality".

King Hiram decided to send his friend Solomon the crack builders of Byblos -- a city known as Gebal to the Hebrews, which explains to Old Testament's reference to these workers as "Giblites".(10) To oversee the Giblites, Hiram assigned the great Master under whom they had worked at Byblos, a man whose name is given as Adoniram or "Hiram Abiff". This Master was specifically described as having been of mixed blood, born of a Jewish mother from the tribe of Naphtali and a Phoenician father who died before his birth(11) -- hence Hiram's epithet, the "Son of the Widow". We take particular note of these attributes here for two reasons: first, because one of the Knights who completes the Quest of the Grail, Parsifal, is also described as the "Son of the Widow"; and second, because we have seen (and will see again) prophetic references to the mixed Punic lineage of Antichrist.

When Hiram Abiff and his crew arrived in Jerusalem, Solomon unveiled to them his plans for the erection of the House the Lord Adonai, whom they naturally confused with their own demigod Adonis. Quite foreseeably, they proceeded to erect a temple very much along the lines of the Byblian temple they had just completed. For example, outside the Temple's hallowed eastern entrance they erected two huge freestanding pillars, cast in bronze and lavishly adorned with images of pomegranates -- whose numerous red seeds symbolize the fructifying blood of Adonis -- and depictions of the iris flower fleur-de-lys -- an emblem of Adonis' ritual castration. In the Phoenician mysteries practiced at Byblos, the two pillars represented Adonis and his brother, who annually assumed the shape of a wild boar and disemboweled him. This mythic fratricide motif obviously connects with the archetype of Cain and Abel and suggests an antediluvian provenance of the Byblian ritual. Highly significant also is the Phoenicians' identification of the murderous "boar" with Typhon -- the prototype of Egypt's Set, who murdered and dismembered his own brother Osiris. In our previous analysis, we have linked Typhon to the Comet of Exodus, which has now returned, in the form of Hale-Bopp, to herald the parousia of Antichrist.

In the Byblian temple of Astarte, the first of the two pillars (that is, in accordance with ancient Mediterranean usage, the one on the right) was consecrated to Adonis, while the second pillar was dedicated to Typhon. The Hebrews assigned their own titles to these two pillars, naming the first Jachin, which means "established in", and the second Boaz, which means "strength". From this we deduce that the Jews viewed Typhon and Boaz as being somewhat equivalent. But who or what was Boaz? Serendipitously, we find that the answer to this question takes us right back to our mysterious Sang real. Let's start out with a little Gospel genealogy:

And Salmon begat Boaz of Rachab; and Boaz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat Jesse;
And Jesse begat David the King; and David begat Solomon of her who had been the wife of Uriah the Hittite;(12)

From this we discover that Boaz is the great-grandfather of David, and therefore an ancestor of Christ. At the same time, he is also a forebear of those two scions of the House of David whom we have been pursuing -- the Frankish king Clovis and the fabled Grail Knight. Since Boaz married Ruth, the Moabite widow, his progeny might aptly be described as "Sons of the Widow" -- a designation seemingly linking a branch of the Davidic lineage to that of Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon's Temple. This nexus reverberates in the words of Zechariah expanding upon the prophetic imagery of the "Branch from the root of Jesse":

Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall also build the temple of the Lord:
Even he shall build the temple of the Lord; and he shall bear the glory and shall sit and rule upon his throne; and he shall be a priest upon his throne;(13)

Let's back up a bit and see where all of this is leading us. Since we know that Antichrist is to be widely accepted -- for a time -- as the Messiah, we infer that he will lay claim to the Messianic title "The Branch". While his claim will ultimately rest on falsehoods, however, we should not presume that it will be fabricated out of whole cloth, for the Beast is a master of deception, and the best deceptions hew as closely to the truth as possible. Therefore, we must posit that Antichrist will indeed be capable of presenting a convincing case for his Messianic pedigree -- which means that he will actually be able to trace his lineage to the royal House of David. But if he is ostensibly to fit the role of The Branch, the Man of Sin must also -- with an eye toward Zechariah's criteria -- undertake to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. And who better to shoulder that task than a "Son of the Widow", a descendant of Master builder Hiram Abiff?

Thus it is not by accident that, as we advance further into the end Times, we hear the clamor for the restoration of the Temple of Jerusalem rising to a crescendo within both Jewish and Christian circles. As a matter of fact, we are witnessing a bizarre convergence of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic "fundamentalism" focused on the Temple Mount and the imminent expectation of a priest-king who will exercise both spiritual and temporal dominion. Oddly enough, this incipient movement also has its adherents in the various strains of New Age "spiritualism" embracing the concept of an "Ascended Master" who will return to preside over a new Aeon of "peace". And even many who profess to be devotees of the Blessed Mother envision a Great Monarch who will wield his temporal scepter in the service of the so-called Vicar of Christ.

Yet, if there has been one theme consistently clear in the messages of Our Lady -- and in the Gospel of Her Son -- it is the rejection of temporal power as an instrument of human Redemption. Christ was betrayed by Judas and his Zealots precisely because he would not -- in any way -- grasp for the purple robes of sovereignty. This is why those who crucified Him thought to mock him by cloaking him in royal colors and plaiting a thorny crown to His brow. Above His head they hung the ensign INRI, sardonically proclaiming him to be the King of a people who rejected him for the very reason that he had spurned dominion in this World.

When we spoke, in the previous section of this treatise, of the corrosive heresy which is to invade the Church just before the Final War, we found Nostradamus pointing us in the direction of the Cathars, a Gnostic sect which was violently silenced in the 13th Century. In fact, the suppression of Catharism coincides very closely with the appearance of the first troubadour chansons celebrating the Quest of the Holy Grail, and it is quite possible that the Grail romances were originally conceived as an encoded form of these heretical ideas disguised to evade the watchful eye of the Inquisition. The dualism of the Cathars was a symptom of the radical division of the human psyche which the Age of Warfare had wrought. From their insistence on an impassable chasm between Matter and Spirit came the heretics' denial that Christ could be at once Human and Divine -- making Catharism a form of Arianism, a heresy which we will find to be intimately bound up with the Grail Legend and with the Merovingian bloodline of Clovis.

Central to this heresy is the re-casting of Christ as the rightful monarch of this World, the Messiah of a temporal Zion. To those of the Arian persuasion, Jesus was the King of the Jews that the Roman insignia announced him to be -- which is why we find various forms of the INRI logo suspiciously recurring in the symbolic language of underground Arianism throughout the centuries. Another centerpiece of Arian iconography are the dual pillars, Jachin and Boaz, which guarded the sanctuary of the Temple of Solomon, because they connote the right of Messianic kingship "established" in Boaz, which is to say the royal line of King David. That the Grail romances embody this Arian symbolism is clear from the names of their allegorical characters. In the German version, for example, the Maimed King is named Anfortas, which translates in Latin as "in strength" -- the exact cognate of Boaz in Hebrew.

In the French version, on the hand, the Fisher King is called Pelles, an obvious corruption of Pallas, the Greek goddess after whom the sacred Palladium of Troy was named. Like the Palladium, the Grail was often depicted as a stone cast down from heaven, and some variants of the Legend describe it is as a jewel dislodged from Lucifer's crown as he plummeted. This apparent linkage between the Palladium, the Grail and the Fallen Angels is worth pursuing a bit further.

Starting with the Palladium, it was said to have once enjoyed the most honored place on Mount Olympus -- immediately beside the throne of Zeus -- comparable to Lucifer's premier place among the angelic host before his rebellion. When Electra, one of the seven Pleiades, was violated by Zeus, she clung to the Palladium for protection against the wrath of her chaste patroness Athena, who, declaring the sacred stone to have been defiled by Electra's touch, cast both of them down to Earth. This mythic scenario appears to have evolved in response to a contemporaneous celestial event in the Pleiades star cluster. Known from time immemorial as the "Seven Sisters", on account of the seven stars visible to the naked eye, the Pleiades suddenly lost one of the Sisters shortly after the fall of ancient Troy in the second millennium before Christ. Since the star which disappeared was Electra, the fabled mother of the Trojan race, the Greeks ascribed her fall to grief at the destruction of her children.

Among peoples as diverse as the Chinese and the Mayans of Central America, the Pleiades are a remarkably consistent feature in myths of the great global cataclysm which we know as the Deluge. According to these ancestral memories, the cataclysm which destroyed the fabled antediluvian civilization occurred when the Pleiades were culminating, i.e. crossing the celestial meridian, at midnight. In the Mayan legends, moreover, the onset of the end of Time is to be augured by cosmic portents accompanying the Seven Sisters' midnight culmination, which occurs each year in mid-November. This timing is in sync with our previous discourse anticipating massive Leionid meteor storms in mid-November of 1988 and/or 1999. My reader may also recall, from that same discussion, Nostradamus' forecast of Antichrist's nascent military might in the aftermath of Mars' conjunction with the tip of the Archer's arrow on November 11, 1997.

From the standpoint of our exploration of the Grail, the association of the Pleiades -- and hence of the Palladium -- with the destruction of the antediluvian civilization is particularly intriguing. We have ascribed this lost civilization to the race of Cain, a people of giant stature who Plato called "Atlanteans", because they were descended from Atlas the Titan. Since Atlas was also the father of the Seven Sisters, there begins to emerge an archetypal equivalency between the catastrophe which annihilated the Cainites and the cosmic calamity which reduced the Pleiades from Seven to Six and precipitated the desecrated Palladium to the Earth. Indeed, this archetypal pattern -- a veritable psychic "constellation" -- extends even further to encompass the fall of Troy as well as the fall of Lucifer's angels. Before proceeding forward on the prophetic path of the "Trojan blood" toward history's Final War, therefore, we do well to consider the consequences of the very First War in Heaven.

If we understand the cause of the First War, then we also know the root of every war that ever has been or ever will be fought. That cause was and is envy of the Son of Man. Out of the infernal root of envy grows pride, which is the false consciousness of the ego as a center of experience apart from the Body of the God-Man. Because Man is a vision-centered creature, we regard the eye as the center of experience, which explains why we construct the mythical archetype of our egocentric experience in the form of the one-eyed Cyclops. But we intuitively picture the stars in the heavens above us as "eyes" as well, and the night sky becomes a place of exile for those portions of our experience which cannot be assimilated by our ego-identity. Unlike the single eye of our diurnal consciousness, the eyes of night spontaneously integrate themselves in ascending orders of complexity -- from asterisms to constellations to the Zodiac. This impulse to combine in unities of greater and greater complexity is the signature of God's Mind at work, and thus we find Yahweh answering the laments of Job in these words:

Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth [the Zodiac] in his season?(14)

It is no accident that the Pleiades consisted of Seven "eyes", a concept which opens to us the meaning of Zechariah's vision of the foundation stone of the Divine Temple:

... for behold, I will bring forth my servant the BRANCH.
For behold the stone which I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.
In that day, saith the Lord of hosts, shall ye call every man his neighbor under the vine and under the fig tree.(15)

Unless we are blinded by temporal and political agendas, we cannot plausibly interpret this prophecy as dealing primarily with a mundane temple, for it manifestly speaks to the Temple of Man, of which the BRANCH, i.e. the Son of Man, is the foundation stone -- the stone bearing the Seven eyes of constellated Consciousness. It is this Consciousness which is the basis of the sublime unity of mankind so beautifully evoked by Zechariah's image of the gathering of neighbors beneath the all-embracing Vine, which is the Christ. Only in that Sublime unity can Man fulfill his destiny, a destiny preordained by the defection of Lucifer's host: to fill the heavenly thrones left vacant by the Fallen Angels.

Once we absorb the full implications of our divine destiny, we begin to comprehend the significance of the Seven "eyes" of the Pleiades becoming diminished to Six with the descent of the Palladium to Earth. To the Lord belongs the Seventh "day" -- i.e. the Seventh Millennium, of which Zechariah speaks as the "one day" in which Yahweh will "remove the iniquity of that land". But, in the pagan reckoning, the Seventh day is the day of Saturn, whose accursed immortality is sustained by the flesh of his own children. In this sense, it is easy to view Saturn and his Phoenician counterpart Moloch as metaphors for the culture of War which sacrifices the innocent, but this archetype has deeper layers of meaning as well. Saturn eats his Six offspring because he knows that he must die if they grow to maturity -- that is, in the ascending order of God's Creation, each level of complexity must give way in turn, until the One is at last achieved. But the insular self, which is represented by Set-Saturn-Satan, refuses to be transcended, and hence it must literally strive to prevent the Present from becoming the Future, so that it might "live forever". Moreover, since sequential Time is not more than an epiphenomenon of ego-experience, this exertion of the Will against temporal passage is not entirely fatuous, but actually effects an attenuation of Time which becomes extreme -- nearly asymptotic -- as the End is approached.(16) It follows that the most salient feature of the end-Time is the reduction of ego-experience to an increasingly random sequence of disjointed ephemera -- the "virtual reality" into which humanity is now so haplessly sinking.

This "tape loop" form of reality is the inevitable appurtenance of the self-replicating order, which the ego-self prefers to transcendent order of the Seven-eyed stone. As a matter of fact, we can gain some valuable insight into the Beast's numerical identity if we think of the process of counting to Seven stalled at the penultimate digit: 1-2-3-4-5- 6-6-6 ... Insofar as the appearance of the Palladium on Earth corresponds to the Seven Sisters getting pared down to Six, therefore, this erstwhile sacred stone must be recognized as the potential foundation of the very temple in which St. Paul foresees the Man of Sin ultimately taking his seat. According to the Third Secret of Fatima and the Secret of La Salette, however, that desolated temple will be in Rome, which clearly implies the presence of the Palladium in the Eternal City.

But didn't we say earlier that the stone had disappeared from Troy just before it fell to the Greeks? Yes, but recall also the two Trojan traitors who escaped the doomed city -- Antenor, the ancestor of Clovis and his Merovingian dynasty, and Aeneas, the founder of Rome and progenitor of its Caesars. Ancient historians tell us that Aeneas brought the Palladium with him from Troy to Italy, and that it became a fixture in the temple of Vesta in Rome, where it was said to have promoted the growth of the Empire and guaranteed its security. Speaking through his Delphic priestesses, Apollo himself had decreed that wherever the sacred stone went, dominion would follow, and the god's words certainly appeared to be fulfilled in the glorious rise of Roman imperial power. In this respect, this Stone of Empire may be seen as the temporal counterpart of the Rock of St. Peter, and perhaps also as the basis of a competing succession -- the one from which we may expect the False Messiah to emerge. For such a contra-Apostolic succession to assert any credible Messianic claim, however, it would also have to be based on the Branch from the roots of Jesse, i.e. the royal House of Judah. This, in turn, suggests that the dynastic succession which culminates in the Beast must flow from a confluence the bloodline of the Palladium, i.e. that of King Priam of Troy, with the Davidic lineage of King Solomon.

In considering how such a such a genealogical confluence might come about, we should be mindful of the key role which heraldry played in the authentication of royalty before the advent of birth records and DNA analysis. Heraldry itself was a refinement of even earlier customs in which the right of kingship rested on actual possession of the cult objects identifying the royal line. Therein lies the reason why the Romans, like other empires before and since, were always intent upon despoiling conquered peoples of their royal treasures -- not primarily for their material value, but rather because, by possessing the emblems of sovereignty, they legitimized their own right to rule. This acquisition of the sovereign trappings of the subjugated nation would often be accompanied by intermarriage of the new rulers with the old royal family. Just as the Palladium blazoned the royal House of Priam, so the treasures of King Solomon betokened the House of David, and as the sacred stone of Troy found its way to Rome, so did the hallowed objects of the Temple of Jerusalem after it was plundered by Titus in 70 AD. If, as we have already surmised, the Sangraal is the dynastic talisman of a Trojan-Davidic bloodline, then we would expect it be an amalgam of their respective royal emblems, as indeed it is -- appearing sometimes as a sacred stone, like the Palladium, and at other times as a golden goblet or serving dish, such as would have been part of Solomon's treasure.

Whether or not the Grail ever existed as an actual object -- and what became of it if it did -- thus turns out to have little relevance to our particular inquiry. When the myths and legends report the Grail to have traveled here or there, we should interpret this information as describing the peregrinations of the Messianic pretenders within whose veins flows the Sang real. If we count our quest accomplished simply because we think we have found the Grail object, we make the same mistake as did the Knight Parsifal when he failed to ask the all-important question: "Whom does it serve?" The answer, as we should by now expect, can only lead us back to the Keeper of the Grail -- the Fisher King.

 

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The Fisher King

The Fisher King

In the very name Fisher King is a reference to Jesus of Nazareth which is more than allusive, but rather unabashedly direct and obvious. Christ called upon His Apostles to be fishers of men, and thus we must expect that the contra-Apostolic succession -- which looks to the Beast as its king -- must also be fishers of men. But they have dropped their hooks into an altogether different part of the human Sea, and this is where the radical division of the Male and Female principles of our collective psyche comes into play.

Psychiatrists have compiled a detailed body of clinical data on the pathology of personality dissociation and understand quite a bit about the dysfunction as it affects individuals. We have talked about the Work of the divine Will in the integration, or "constellation", of Creation's manifold centers of experience -- so that each is more exalted as a center, while at the same time totally dissolving into the whole. There is an opposite process -- an infernal process by which the higher orders of Creation are disintegrated or "atomized". We must hasten to add that this infernal process does not stand apart from the divine Will, though it perceives itself to do so. And in fact, this false perception of separateness is itself symptomatic of dissociation.

Much less is known about the dissociation of the collective psyche, for the simple reason that we all suffer from the affliction, in varying degrees -- which renders us oblivious to the existence of a such a thing as a "collective psyche". Millions are those who "believe" in Christ, or Allah, or Yahweh, or whomever, yet -- this is absolutely crucial -- they do not experience themselves to be part of Him in whom they believe. And yet they are, we all are members of the mystical Body of the God-Man, as St. Paul instructs us. On a collective basis, therefore, our Consciousness is dissociated, which means we are totally blind to a large portion of our corporate Self -- and this is the portion for which the Fisher King casts his net.

In the allegorical language of the Grail romances, the Fisher King's catch is the Salmon of Wisdom, which he serves upon the Sangraal in the form of a large platter, such as that on which the Baptist's head was presented to Herodias. Earlier we described the Four Grail Hallows and related two of them -- the Cup and the Lance -- to Christ. But, paradoxically, the other two Hallow

 

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THE CRUSADER KNIGHTS
By the time of the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, the Merovingians of France had been formally ignored for some 300 years. They were far from extinct, but they had certainly been manoeuvred out of the picture as far as the Church and its dutiful historians were concerned. During their reign, however, the Merovingians had established a number of customs which prevailed even though the general administration had become feudal. One of the Merovingian innovations was a system of regional supervision by chief officers called Comites (Counts). As deputies of the Kings, the Counts acted as chancellors, judges and military leaders. They were not unlike the Celtic Earls of Britain, although the nature of both titular groups became changed to incorporate land tenure during feudal times.
In the 11th century, the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne emerged at the very forefront of Flemish society. Given Godefroi de Bouillon's Davidic inheritance, through the Merovingians, it was fitting enough that he (a brother of Count Eustace III of Boulogne) should become the designated King of Jerusalem after the First Crusade. This military venture was sparked in 1095 by the Muslim seizure of Jerusalem, and it was particularly inspired by Peter the Hermit who led an ill-fated Peasants' Crusade of men, women and children across Europe to regain the Holy Land. The majority did not reach their destination; thousands were massacred en route by outlaws and wayward soldiers of the Byzantine Empire. In the esoteric Tarot cards, the Hermit (an allusion to Peter) is portrayed with a lantern lighting the way.
In the wake of the Hermit's misfortune, Pope Urban II raised a formidable army, led by the best knights in Europe. They were coordinated by Adhemar, Bishop of Le Puy, and in the vanguard was Robert, Duc de Normandie, together with Stephen, Comte de Blois, and Hugh, Comte de Vermandois. The Flemish contingent was led by Robert, Comte de Flandres, and included Eustace, Comte de Boulogne, with his brothers Godefroi de Bouillon and Baldwin. The south of France was represented by Raymond de Saint Gilles, Comte de Toulouse.
At that point Godefroi de Bouillon was Duke of Lower Lorraine. He had succeeded to the title through his famous mother, St Ida, who was responsible for the rebuilding of the great cathedral at Boulogne. From Ida, Godefroi gained the castle and lands of Bouillon, but he mortgaged his entire inheritance to the Bishop of Liege in order to fund his Holy Land campaign. By the time the First Crusade was underway, Godefroi had become its overall commander, and on its eventual success in 1099 he was proclaimed King of Jerusalem. In the event, he preferred not to use the title 'King', assuming instead the alternative distinction, 'Guardian of the Sacred Sepulchre'.
Of the eight Crusades, which persisted until 1291 in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, only Godefroi's First Crusade was to any ultimate avail. But even that was marred by the excesses of some irresponsible troops who used their victory as an excuse for wholesale slaughter of Muslims in the streets of Jerusalem. Not only was Jerusalem important to the Jews and Christians, but it had become the third Holy City of Islam, after Mecca and Medina. As such, the city sits at the heart of continuing disputes today.
The Second Crusade to Edessa, led by Louis VIII of France and the German Emperor Conrad III, failed miserably. Then, around 100 years after Godefroi's initial success, Jerusalem fell again to the mighty Saladin in 1187. This prompted the Third Crusade, under Philip Augustus of France and Richard the Lionheart of England, but they did not manage to win back the Holy City. The Fourth and Fifth Crusades centred on Constantinople and Damietta. Jerusalem was reclaimed briefly after Emperor Frederick II's Sixth Crusade, but was finally conceded to the Sultan of Egypt in 1244. Loins IX then led the Seventh and Eighth Crusades, but fell short of reversing the situation. By 1291, Palestine and Syria were firmly under Muslim control, and the Crusades were over.
During this crusading era, various knightly Orders emerged, including the Ordre de Sion (Order of Sion)2 founded by Godefroi de Bouillon in 1099. Others were the Knights Protectors of the Sacred Sepulchre and the Knights Templars. Godefroi de Bouillon died in 1100, soon after his Jerusalem triumph, and was succeeded as king by his younger brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. After 18 years, Baldwin was followed (in 1118) by his cousin, Baldwin II du Bourg. According to the orthodox accounts, the Knights Templars were founded in that year as the 'Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon'. They were said to have been established by a group of nine French knights, who took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and swore to protect the Holy Land.
The Frankish historian Guillaume de Tyre wrote at the height of the Crusades (in around 1180) that the function of the Templars was to safeguard the highways for pilgrims. But, given the enormity of such an obligation, it is inconceivable that nine poor men succeeded without enlisting new recruits until they returned to Europe in 1128. In truth, there was a good deal more to the Order than is conveyed in Guillaume's account. The Knights were in existence for some years before they were said to have been founded by Hugues de Payens, and their function was certainly not high- way patrol. They were the King's front-line diplomats in a Muslim environment, and in this capacity they endeavoured to make due amends for the actions of unruly Crusaders against the Sultan's defenceless subjects. The Bishop of Chartres wrote about the Templars as early as 1114, calling them the MiIice du Christi (Soldiers of Christ). At that time the Knights were already installed at Baldwin's palace, which was located within a mosque on the site of King Solomon's Temple. When Baldwin moved to the domed citadel on the Tower of David, the Temple quarters were left entirely to the Order of Templars.
Hugues de Payens, the first Grand Master of the Templars, was a cousin and vassal of the Comte de Champagne. His second-in-command was the Flemish knight Godefroi Saint Omer, and another recruit was Andre de Montbard, a kinsman of the Count of Burgundy. In 1120, Fulk, Comte d'Anjou (father of Geoffrey Plantagenet) also joined the Order, and he was followed in 1124 by Hugues, Comte de Champagne. The Knights were evidently far from poor, and there is no record of these illustrious noblemen policing the Bedouin-infested highways for the benefit of pilgrims. The King's chronicler, Fulk de Chartres, certainly did not portray them in that light.
The task of ministering to the pilgrims was actually performed by the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem. The separate Knights Templars were a very select and special unit. They had sworn a particular oath of obedience — not to the King, nor to their leader, but to the Cistercian Abbot, St Bernard de Clairvaux (died 1153).3 St Bernard was related to the Comte de Champagne and, through him, to Hugues de Payens. Indeed, it was on land donated by the Count that Bernard built the Cistercian monastery of Clairvaux in 1115. Bernard's mother was Aleth, the sister of Andre de Montbard, and the other Knights of the Order were his own hand-picked Flemings. They included Archambaud de Saint Amand, Geoffrey Bisol, Rosal, Gondemare, Godefroi, and Payen de Montdidier.
It was St Bernard who rescued Scotland's failing Celtic Church, and rebuilt the Columban monastery on lona. 4 It was St Bernard who (from 1128) first translated the 'sacred geometry' of King Solomon's masons, and it was St Bernard who preached the Second Crusade at Vezelay to King Louis VII and a congregation of 100,000. At Vezelay stood the great Basilica of St Mary Magdalene, and St Bernard's Oath of the Knights Templars required the 'Obedience of Bethany — the castle of Mary and Martha'. 5
There is no coincidence in the fact that Chretien de Troyes' 12th-century work, Le Conte del Graal, was dedicated to Philippe d'Alsace, Comte de Flandres. Nor was it by chance that Chretien was sponsored and encouraged in his undertaking by Countess Mane and the Court of Champagne. Grail lore was born directly out of this early Templar environment, and the Perlesvaus portrayed the Knights as the wardens of a great and sacred secret. Wolfram's Parzival defined them as the Guardians of the Grail Family.

THE SECRETS OF THE ARK
Deep beneath the Jerusalem Temple site was the great stable of King Solomon, which had remained sealed and untouched since Biblical times. The enormous underground shelter was described by a Crusader as 'a stable of such marvellous capacity and extent that it could hold more than 2,000 horses'. 6 To find and open up this capacious store-room was the original secret mission of the Knights Templars, for it was known by St Bernard to contain the Ark of the Covenant which, in turn, held the greatest of all treasures — the Tables of Testimony. 7
One might well ask why these relics from the time of Moses became the objects of such a guarded mission fronted by a Cistercian abbot and the flower of Flemish nobility. Today's Church-approved writings state that the tablets of Moses bore the Ten Commandments etched into stone by God Himself — yet the substance of these well-known decrees of moral discipline hardly constituted any sort of secret. In fact, the tablets sought by the Knights were uniquely important, for they bore far more than the familiar Commandments. Inscribed on them were the Tables of Testimony — the Cosmic Equation: the divine law of number, measure and weight. The mystical art of reading the inscriptions was achieved by the cryptic system of the Cabbala.
The Ten Commandments were something else altogether. They were the precepts that God first delivered to Moses and the people on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20 to 23), accompanied by a series of verbal ordinances. Then, God said to Moses (Exodus 24:12), Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.
There are three quite separate items listed here: tables of stone; a law; commandments. God further stated, 'And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give thee' (Exodus 25:16). Later, in Exodus 31:18, 'he gave unto Moses . . . two tables of testimony, tables of stone. . .'
The original tablets were broken by Moses when he cast them to the ground (Exodus 32:19). Afterwards, God said to Moses (Exodus 34:1), Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.
Subsequently, God verbally reiterated the Commandments, and said to Moses, 'Write thou these words', whereupon Moses 'wrote . . . the words of the covenant, the ten commandments' (Exodus 34:27-28).
There was a positive distinction made between the 'Tables of Testimony', written by God, and the 'Ten Commandments', which were separately written by Moses. For centuries the Church has implied that the Covenant of the Ten Commandments was the important part of this package, in consequence of which the truly important Tables of Testimony have been strategically ignored.
Onwards from Exodus 25, precise instructions for the Ark's construction are set down in great detail. Similarly, the methods for its transportation are given, along with the specifications for clothes and footwear to be worn by the bearers and overseers. The design and materials for the Tabernacle, in which the Ark was to be kept, are in addition thoroughly described, as is the composition of the altar within. Notwithstanding all of this. Exodus 37 to 40 continues to give a full account of how these instructions were followed to the letter, so repeating everything again. There was no room for any mistakes, nor any deviation from the blueprints laid down. All the building work was entrusted to Bezaleel, the son of Uri ben Hur of Judah.
When constructed precisely in compliance with the Old Testament descriptions, the Ark is discovered to be not only an elaborate coffer but an electrical condenser — built of resinous wood, and double-plated inside and out with gold. The facts have been stated many times by scientists and theologians alike. The individual plates when negatively and positively charged can produce several hundred volts — sufficient even to kill a man. Uzzah discovered this to his cost when he touched the Ark (2 Samuel 6:6-7 and I Chronicles 13:9-10). Moreover, the Ark also emerges as an effective transmitter of sound, with its two magnetic cherubim and the Mercy Seat between, where Moses communicated with God (Exodus 25:22).
The Ten Commandments were, and are, written, spoken, discussed and taught. They have never been a secret to anyone — unlike the Tables of Testimony. These precious tabulations were placed in the self-protecting Ark, to be guarded by the Levites. Following the Ark's dramatic transportation across Jordan and through Palestine (Joshua and I Samuel), it was taken to Sion (Jerusalem) by David. His son. King Solomon, had the Temple built by the Master-Mason Hiram Abiff, and the Ark was lodged in the Holy of Holies. Access was forbidden, except for ritual inspection by the High Priest alone once a year. Apart from a few items of passing reference, that is the last the Bible has to tell about the Ark of the Covenant. Rumour suggested that the Ark was removed to Ethiopia (Abyssinia), but Revelation 11:19 indicates that it remained in the Temple of Heaven. Undoubtedly, the Ark and the Tables were the prized possessions of Jerusalem — but when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple (in around 586 BC), neither was listed in the schedule of plunder.
By 1127, the Templars' search was over. They had retrieved not only the Ark and its contents, but an untold wealth of gold bullion and hidden treasure, all of which had been safely stowed below ground long prior to the Roman demolition and plunder of AD 70. It was not until very recently, in 1956, that confirmatory evidence of the Jerusalem hoard came to light at Manchester University. The deciphering of the Qumran Copper Scroll was completed that year. It revealed that an 'indeterminable treasure', along with a vast stockpile of bullion and valuables, had been buried beneath the Temple.
In the light of the Templars' overwhelming success, Hugues de Payens received a summons from St Bernard to attend a forthcoming Council at Troyes. It was to be chaired by the papal ambassador, the Cardinal Legate of France. Hugues and a company of knights duly left the Holy Land with their auspicious find, and St Bernard announced that the Templars' mission had been fulfilled. He wrote, The work has been accomplished with our help, and the Knights have been sent on a journey through France and Burgundy, under the protection of the Count of Champagne, where all precautions can be taken against all interference by public or ecclesiastical authority. 8
The Champagne Court at Troyes was well prepared for the cryptic translation work to follow. In readiness, the Court had long sponsored an influential school of Cabbalistic and esoteric studies. The Council of Troyes was held as planned in 1128, at which time St Bernard became the official Patron and Protector of the Knights Templars, using a beehive as his personal emblem. In that year, international status as a Sovereign Order was conferred upon the Templars, and their Jerusalem headquarters became the governing office of the capital city. The Church established the Knights as a religious Order, and Hugues de Payens became the first Grand Master.
As a mark of particular distinction, the Templars were classified as Warrior-Monks, granted the right to wear the white mantles of purity — a privilege not given to any other military group — and obliged to grow their beards to separate them from lesser fraternities in which the knights were clean-shaven. In 1146, the Templars were awarded their famous conventual blood cross by the Cistercian Pope Eugenius III.
As distinct from the Templars' Cross (red on white), the Hospitallers of Saint John used a different colour scheme (silver on black) in the same design. Their pilgrims' hospital in Jerusalem was founded before the Crusades, in about 1050. After the fall of Acre, which ended the Crusades in 1291, the Hospitallers were forced to leave Palestine. They went to Rhodes and Cyprus, adding secular and military ventures to their activities. From 1530 they were established as the Knights of Malta. An offshoot, chartered in 1888, created Britain's St John Ambulance Association, which still uses the same badge.
After the Council of Troyes, the Templars' rise to international prominence was remarkably swift. They became engaged in high-level politics and diplomacy throughout the western world, and were advisers to monarchs and parliaments alike. Just eleven years later, in 1139, Pope Innocent (another Cistercian) granted the Knights international independence from obligation to any authority save himself. lrrespective of kings, cardinals or governments, the Order's only superior was the Pope. Even prior to this, however, they were granted vast territories and substantial property across the map from Britain to Palestine. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that when Hugues de Payens visited England's Henry I, 'the King received him with much honour, and gave him rich presents'. The Spanish King, Alfonso of Aragon, passed a third of his kingdom to the Order, and the whole of Christendom was at their feet.
NOTRE DAME
When news spread of the Templars' incredible find, the Knights became revered by all, and — notwithstanding their Jerusalem wealth — large donations were received from all quarters. No price was too high to secure affiliation, and within a decade of their return the Templars were probably the most influential body the world has ever known. Nonetheless, despite the prodigious holdings of the Order, the individual Knights were still bound to a vow of poverty. Whatever his station in life, every Templar was obliged to sign over title to his possessions. Even the Grand Master, Hugues de Payens, had done so. Yet still the sons of nobility flocked to join the Order, either as warriors in the Crusades or as travelling ambassadors and political consultants. Being so well funded, the Templars established the first international banking network, becoming financiers for the Levant and for practically every throne in Europe.
Just as the Order grew to high estate, so too did the Cistercians' fortune rise in parallel. St Bernard had built the monastery at Clairvaux in 1115, and a few more Cistercian centres were established in the following decade. Then, within 25 years of the Council of Troyes, the Cistercians could boast of more than 300 abbeys. But that was not the end of it, for the people of France then witnessed the most astounding result of the Templars' knowledge of the universal equation. City skylines began to change as the great Notre Dame cathedrals, with their majestic Gothic arches, rose from the earth. The architecture was phenomenal — impossible, some said. The pointed ogives reached incredible heights, spanning hitherto insurmountable space, with flying buttresses and thinly ribbed vaulting. Everything pulled upwards and, despite the thousands of tons of richly decorated stone, the overall impression was one of magical weightlessness.
By reference to the Tables of Testimony, the Cosmic Law and its sacred geometry were applied by the Templar masons to construct the finest holy monuments ever to grace the Christian world. At the northern door of Notre Dame de Chartres (the Gate of the Initiates), a relief carving on a small column depicts the Ark of the Covenant undergoing transportation. The inscription reads Hic amititur Archa cederis 'Here, things take their course — you are to work through the Ark'.
Both concept and formula for the Notre Dame programme were entirely Templar-Cistercian. The word Gothic as applied to the architectural design had nothing whatever to do with the Goths, but derives instead from the Greek goetik — 'magical [action]' (which is possibly cognate with the old Celtic word goatic 'plant lore'). The cathedrals were all built at much the same time, even though some took more than a century to complete in their various stages. 10 Notre Dame in Paris was begun in 1163, Chartres in 1194, Reims in 1211, and Amiens in 1221. Others of the same era were at Bayeux, Abbeville, Rouen, Laon, Evreux and Etampes. In accordance with the Hermetic principle 'As above, so below', 11 the combined ground-plan of the Notre Dame cathedrals replicates the Virgo constellation. 12
Of all these, the Notre Dame at Chartres is said to stand on the most sacred ground. Notable among the authorities on the history of Chartres Cathedral is Louis Charpentier, whose research and writings have done much to increase the understanding of Gothic architecture in general. At Chartres the telluric earth currents are at their highest, and the site was recognised for its divine atmosphere even in Druidic times. So venerated is the location of Chartres that it is the only cathedral not to have a single king, bishop, cardinal, canon, or anyone interred in the soil of its mound. It was a pagan site, dedicated to the traditional Mother Goddess — a site to which pilgrims travelled long before the time of Jesus. "The original altar was built above the Grotte des Druides, which housed a sacred dolmen," and was identified with the 'Womb of the Earth'."
One of the greatest mysteries of Cistercian Gothic architecture is the stained glass used in the cathedral windows. It first appeared in the early 12th century, but disappeared just as suddenly in the middle of the 13th century. Nothing like it had ever been seen before, and nothing like it has been seen since. 14 Not only is the luminosity of truly Gothic stained glass greater than any other, but its light-enhancement qualities are far more effective. Unlike the stained glass of other architectural schools, its interior effect is the same whether the light outside is bright or dim. Even in twilight, this glass retains its brilliance way beyond that of any other.
Gothic stained glass also has the unique power to transform harmful ultra-violet rays into beneficial light, but the secret of its manufacture was never revealed. Although it is known to have been a product of Hermetic alchemy, no modem scientific process or chemical analysis has yet managed to penetrate its mystery. Those employed to perfect Gothic glass were Persian philosophical mathematicians such as Omar Khayyam, and the adepts claimed their method of staining incorporated the Spiritus Mundi — the cosmic breath of the universe. In modem language this corresponds to high-energy penetrative radiation.
Throughout the Gothic cathedrals, works of art abound in stone and glass, depicting Biblical history and the Gospel stories, in which much attention is given to the life of Jesus. Some of the work currently visible was added after the 1300s, but during the true Gothic era there was not one portrayal of the Crucifixion. On the basis of pre-Gospel writings which they found in Jerusalem, the Templars denied the Crucifixion sequence as described in the New Testament, and for that reason never depicted the scene. The 12th-century window in the West front of Chartres includes a medallion of the Crucifixion, but this was transferred from elsewhere at a later date — probably from St Denis, just north of Paris. There are similarly inherited windows at other Notre Dame cathedrals.
In addition to the Jerusalem bullion, the Templars also found a wealth of ancient manuscript books in Hebrew and Syriac. As mentioned above, many of these predated the Gospels, providing first-hand accounts that had not been edited by any ecclesiastical authority. It was widely accepted that the Knights possessed an insight which eclipsed orthodox Christianity, an insight that permitted them he certainty that the Church had misinterpreted both the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. They were nevertheless highly regarded as holy men, and were firmly attached to the Cistercian popes of the era.
In times to follow, however, the once revered knowledge of the Templars caused their persecution by the savage Dominicans of the 14th-century Inquisition. It was at that point in the history of Christianity that the knowledge nor access to truths counted for anything against the hard new party line of Rome. So too did all traces of the female aspect disappear, with only Mary the mother of Jesus left to represent all womankind. In practice, her semi-divine Virgin-Madonna status was so far removed from any reality that she represented no one. But for all that, a ray of hope has prevailed through the centuries — for another female light shines from the cathedrals of Notre Dame. The age-old cult of Mary Magdalene, the embodiment of the Pistis Sophia, remains fully central to the theme, and the beautiful Magdalene window at Chartres has an inscription which reads 'Donated by the Water-carriers' (the Aquarians). Mary was the bearer of the Holy Grail, and she will undoubtedly become ever more prominent as the great new Inspiration' of the Aquarian Age — the age of renewed intellect, wisdom and the Universal Law of the Ark.

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE THIRD DEGREE
The Notre Dame cathedrals and major Gothic constructions were mainly the work of the Children of Solomon — a guild of masons instructed by St Bernard's Cistercian Order. St Bernard had translated the secret geometry of King Solomon's masons who, under their own master, Hiram Abiff, were denoted by degrees of knowledge and proficiency. Solomon had specifically approached King Hiram of Tyre for the assistance d Hiram Abiff, an architect and metalworker skilled in sacred geometry. 15 Even though Tyre was a renowned centre of Goddess worship, Hiram Abiff became the chief designer and Master Mason for the Temple of Jehovah. By virtue of this, he was destined to become a key symbolic figure in later Freemasonry.
Other masonic brotherhoods of medieval France were the Children of Father Soubise, and the Children of Master Jacques. 16 When the 14th-century Dominican-led Inquisition against the Templars was in full swing, these guilds were equally at risk. Being practitioners of the Masonic Craft, they held privileged information concerning the workings of sacred geometry and Universal Law according to their attained degrees. There were three such degrees: Apprentice Companion, Attained Companion, and Master Companion — just as there are now three degrees in the mainstream of modem speculative Freemasonry. This is why, following the Inquisition of the Templars, a severe interrogation to extract the most vital or the most secret information is often called the 'third degree'.
Although modern Freemasonry is said to derive from the medieval guilds of Europe, the Craft had far more distant origins. Carvings on the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park, New York, have been identified as masonic symbols from the time of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (c. 1468-1436 BC) 17 — the great-great-grandfather of Moses. Tuthmosis (heir of Tuth/Thoth) was the founder of an influential secret society of scholars and philosophers, whose purpose was to preserve the sacred mysteries. In later times, the Samaritan Magi were members of the Order, being attached to the Egyptian Therapeutate, an ascetic community at Qumran. It was from Egypt that Moses (Akhenaten 18) introduced the concept of temple worship to the Israelites when he created the Tabernacle at Sinai. Similarly, the very notion of priesthood was Egyptian — inherited originally from ancient Sumer. Prior to the Tabernacle of Moses, the Jewish patriarchs had used simple outside stone altars as places of reverence and sacrifice — such as those erected by Noah (Genesis 8:20) and Abraham (Genesis 22:9).
A second Egyptian obelisk from the Temple of the Sun (known for some obscure reason as Cleopatra's Needle — relating to Cleopatra VII — although it predated her by more than a thousand years) stands on the Thames Embankment in London. It is 68 feet 6 inches (20.88 metres) high 19 and weighs 186 tons (tonnes). The two granite obelisks were originally entrance pillars to the Temple at Heliopolis, but were moved to Alexandria in 12 BC, then to London and New York in 1878 and 1881 respectively.
In line with the Egyptian practice of placing free-standing pillars at temple entrances, Hiram Abiff introduced the same theme at the porch of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. The pillars, with their rounded capitals, were akin to the designs of Tyre goddess worship, and were also similar to the fertility symbols dedicated to Astarte in Canaan. The Jerusalem pillars were called Jachin and Boaz (I Kings 7:21 and 2 Chronicles 3:17). They were built hollow in order to serve as repositories for the archival and constitutional rolls of Masonry. Moreover, although the Temple was dedicated to Jehovah and designed primarily to house the Ark of the Covenant, its construction was not limited to the Hebrews' masculine principle of God: it was constructed largely in keeping with traditional custom, and incorporated both the male and female geometric energies.
The Temple was completed in seven years, at the end of which time Hiram was murdered and placed in a shallow grave. His death is said to have come about through his refusal to impart the Master Mason's secrets to the unenlightened workers. Today, the symbolised slaying of Hiram features significantly in the Third Degree ceremony of Freemasonry: the candidate is struck down and raised again from the darkness of his grave by use of the Master Mason's secret grip. Modem Freemasonry is speculative rather than operative, but even in Hiram's day the society of artificers to which he belonged had its own lodges, symbols and passwords. One evident symbol was the ascia, the mason's trowel emblem used by the Pythagoreans and Essenes. It is also found in the catacombs of Rome, where portrayals of masonic initiation were painted in the tombs of the persecuted Innocenti.

SLAUGHTER IN LANGUEDOC
West-north-west of Marseilles, on the Golfe du Lion, stretches the old province of Languedoc where, in 1208, the people were admonished by Pope Innocent III for unchristian behaviour. In the following year, a papal army of 30,000 soldiers descended on the region under the command of Simon de Montfort. They were deceitfully adorned with the red cross of the Holy Land Crusaders, but their purpose was immeasurably different. They had in fact been sent to exterminate the ascetic Cathari sect (the Pure Ones) who resided in Languedoc, and who — according to the Pope and King Philippe II of France — were heretics. The slaughter went on for 35 years, claiming tens of thousands of lives, culminating in the hideous massacre at the seminary of Montsegur, where more than 200 hostages were set up on stakes and burned alive in 1244. 20
In religious terms, the doctrine of the Cathars was essentially Gnostic; they were notably spiritual people, and believed that the spirit was pure but that physical matter was defiled. Although their convictions were unorthodox in comparison with the avaricious pursuits of Rome, the Pope's dread of the Cathars was actually caused by something far more threatening. They were said to be the guardians of a great and sacred treasure, associated with a fantastic and ancient knowledge. The Languedoc region was substantially that which had formed the 8th-century Jewish kingdom of Septimania, under the Merovingian scion Guilhelm de Gellone. The whole area of Languedoc and Provence was steeped in die early traditions of Lazarus (Simon Zelotes) and Mary Magdalene, and the inhabitants regarded Mary as the 'Grail Mother' of true Western Christianity. 21
Like the Templars, the Cathars were expressly tolerant of the Jewish and Muslim cultures, and they also upheld the equality of the sexes. 22 They were nonetheless condemned and violently suppressed by the Catholic Inquisition (formally instituted in 1233), and were charged with all manner of blasphemies.
Contrary to the charges, the witnesses brought to give evidence spoke only of the Cathars' Church of Love, and of their unyielding devotion to the ministry of Jesus. They believed in God and the Holy Spirit, recited the Lord's Prayer, and ran an exemplary society with its own welfare system of charity schools and hospitals. The Cathars even had the Bible translated into their own tongue — the langue d'oc (hence the regional name) — and the non-Cathar population equally benefited from their altruistic efforts.
The Cathars were not heretics; they were simply non-conformists, preaching without licence, and having no requirement for appointed priests, nor the richly adorned churches of their Catholic neighbours. St Bernard had said that 'No sermons are more Christian than theirs, and their morals are pure.' Yet still the papal armies came, in the outward guise of a holy mission, to eradicate their community from the landscape.
The edict of annihilation referred not only to the mystical Cathars themselves but to all who supported them — which included most of the people of Languedoc. To add weight to the Holy Inquisition, the citizens of the region were accused by the Dominican monks of unnatural sexual practices. This charge has led to all sorts of later guesswork as to the nature of such deviations. In fact, what the enlightened people of Languedoc practised was nothing more than birth control. By most standards of accomplishment and learning, the Cathars were probably the most cultured people in Europe, with both boys and girls having equal access to education.
At that time, Provencal Languedoc was not part of France but an independent state-.Politically, it was more associated with the northern Spanish frontier, having the Count of Toulouse as its overlord — a remnant of the Septimanian kingdom. Classical languages were taught, along with literature, philosophy and mathematics. The area was generally quite wealthy and commercially stable — but all this was to change in 1209 when the papal troops arrived in the foothills of the Pyrenees. In allusion to the Languedoc centre at Albi, the savage campaign was called the 'Albigensian Crusade'.
Of all the religious cults that flourished in medieval times, Catharism was the least menacing. The fact that the Cathars were associated with a particular ancient knowledge was in itself no new revelation; Guilhelm de Toulouse de Gellone, King of Septimania 23 had established his Judaic Academy more than four centuries earlier. But the Cathars were known also to be adepts of the occult symbolism of the Cabbala, an expertise that would have been of significant use to the Knights Templars who were thought to have transported the Ark and their Jerusalem hoard to the region. These things (along with the premise that the Cathars held an unsurpassed treasure more historically meaningful than the root of Christianity) led Rome to only one conclusion: the Tables of Testimony and the Jerusalem manuscripts of the Gospel era must be hidden in Languedoc.
Over and above this, the traditions of Provence from the 1st century included the lore of the Grail bloodline. The church at Rennes-le-Chateau had been consecrated to Mary Magdalene in 1059, and the people of the region declared that Rome's interpretation of the Crucifixion was a fraud. In common with the Templars, the Cathars would in no way support the claim that Jesus died on the cross. Although the Cathar ritual was not in itself threatening, the sect was presumed to hold enough information of substance to blow the lid off the fundamental concept of the orthodox Roman Church. There was only one solution for a desperate and fanatical regime, and the word went out: 'Kill them all!'
The people were bloodily killed in their thousands, and their towns demolished, but the treasure was never found. The Church wondered whether it had perhaps been removed during the onslaught, or whether it was still there, as yet undiscovered. Either way, its curse hung over the Pope, and the danger prevailed. The Knights Templars would have known the answer, and in the wake of the Languedoc carnage they were destined to suffer a similar victimization.

PERSECUTION OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS
The mock Crusade ended in 1244, but it was to be another 62 years before Pope Clement V and King Philippe IV were in a position to harass the Knights Templars in their bid for the arcane treasure. By 1306 the Jerusalem Order was so powerful that Philippe IV of Prance viewed them with trepidation; he owed a great deal of money to the Knights but was practically bankrupt. He also feared their political and esoteric might, which he knew to be far greater than his own. With papal support. King Philippe persecuted the Templars in France and endeavoured to eliminate the Order in other countries. Knights were arrested in England, but north of the border in Scotland the papal Bulls were ineffective. This was because King Robert the Bruce and the whole Scottish nation had been excommunicated for taking up arms against Philippe's son-in-law, king Edward II of England. 24
Until 1306, the Knights had always operated without papal interference, but Philippe managed to change this. Following a Vatican edict forbidding him to tax the clergy, the French king arranged for the capture and murder of Pope Boniface VIII. His successor, Benedict XI, also met his end in very mysterious circumstances soon afterwards, to be replaced in 1305 by Philippe's own candidate, Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, who duly became Pope Clement V. With a new Pope under his control through financial indebtedness to him, Philippe drew up his list of accusations against the Knights Templars. The easiest charge to lay was that of heresy, for it was well established that the Knights did not hold to the orthodox view of the Crucifixion, and they would not bear the upright Latin cross. It was also known that the Templars' diplomatic and business affairs involved them with Jews, Gnostics and Muslims.
On Friday 13 October 1307, Philippe's henchmen struck, and Templars were seized throughout France. Captured Knights were imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, and burned. Paid witnesses were called to give evidence against the Order, and some truly bizarre statements were obtained. The Templars were accused of a number of assorted practices deemed unsavoury, including necromancy, homosexuality, abortion, blasphemy, and the black arts. Once they had given their evidence, under whatever circumstances of bribery or duress, the witnesses disappeared without trace. Despite all this, the King did not achieve his primary objective, for the Ark and the treasure remained beyond his grasp. His minions had scoured the length and breadth of Champagne and Languedoc — but all the while the hoard was hidden away in the Treasury vaults of Paris.
At that time, the Grand Master of the Order was Jacques de Molay. Knowing that Pope Clement V was a pawn of King Philippe, de Molay arranged for the Templar treasures to be removed in a fleet of eighteen galleys from La Rochelle. The majority of these treasure ships sailed to Scotland, 25 but Philippe was quite unaware of this and negotiated with other monarchs to have the Templars generally pursued outside France. Subsequently, Philippe forced Pope Clement to outlaw the Order in 1312 and, two years later, Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake.
Edward II of England was reluctant to turn against the Knights but, as Philippe's son-in-law, he was in a difficult position. Thus, on receiving an outright instruction from the Pope, he complied with the rule of the Inquisition. Many Templars were arrested in England, while their lands and preceptories were confiscated and subsequently passed to the Hospitallers of St John.
In Scotland, however, the story was very different: the papal Bull was totally ignored. Long before, in 1128, Hugues de Payens had first met King David I of Scots soon after the Council of Troyes, and St Bernard de Clairvaux had integrated the Celtic Church with his wealthy Cistercian Order. King David granted Hugues and his Knights the lands of Ballantradoch, by the Firth of Forth (now the village of Temple), and they established their primary seat on the South Esk. The Order was then promoted and encouraged by successive kings, particularly William the Lion. Considerable tracts of land were passed to the Knights — especially around the Lothians and Aberdeen — and the Templars also took possession of property in Ayr and western Scotland. A large contingent fought at Bannockburn in 1314, following which they became very prominent in Lome and Argyll. From the time of Robert the Bruce, each successive Bruce and Stewart heir was a Knight Templar from birth and, by virtue of this, the Scots royal line comprised not only Priest-Kings but Knight-Priest-Kings.
These days, history books and encyclopedias are almost unanimous in declaring that the Knights Templars became extinct in the 1300s. They are quite wrong. The Chivalric Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (as distinct from the later contrived Masonic Templars) is still flourishing in continental Europe and Scotland.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCE:
http://www.heraldica.org/topics/france/bouillon.htm

 

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From the earliest times, indeed throughout the history of civilization, people from around the world have held the rose close to their hearts. We know now that roses have existed much longer than any of us imagined. Even before human time roses flourished: 35 million year old fossilized rose flowers and hips have been found in Europe and petrified rose wreaths have been unearthed from ancient Egyptian tombs.

In Greek mythology, Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, is said to have created the rose which arose from her tears and the blood of her lover Adonis. The Romans, turning Aphrodite into their goddess Venus, also adopted the rose: it became the symbol of love and beauty. Cupid, offering a rose when trying to bribe the God of Silence to hush Venus's amourous escapades, made the flower into a symbol for secrecy: Roman dining room ceilings were decorated with roses, reminding guests to keep secret what had been said during dinner. Sub rosa, under the rose, up to this day means "confidentially."

The early Christians saw the five wounds of Christ in the five petals of the Rosa sancta. However, in view of the decadence connected with the Roman rose, the official Christian Church was reluctant to consider the rose a religious symbol. Only after much hesitation was the red rose declared a symbol of the blood of the martyrs. But not only in Christian literature, also in ancient Confucian and Buddhist religious documents we find references to the rose.

MEDICINAL USES

Ancient literature abounds with references to roses used for medicinal, botanical and cosmetic purposes and speaks of their use for feeding the body, the soul and the spirit. Medical texts written on stone tablets mention possibly a wild rambling rose, referred to as arnurdinnu, for medical purposes.

In Persia the much sought after rose oil and oil of attar was made from the heavenly scented damask roses and traded all around the world. The Greeks used rose-scented olive oils for perfume, to keep illness at bay and to anoint their dead. But the Romans outdid the Greeks when Nero, the hedonistic emperor, Ist century AD, dumped tons of rose petals on his dinner guests, nearly suffocating some.

The apothecary rose, R. gallica officinalis, first recorded in the 13th century, was the foundation of a large industry near the city of Provins, France. Turned into jellies, powders and oils, this rose was believed to cure a multitude of illnesses.

In England, the rose became truly "royal" during the 15th century War of the Roses: The House of York adopted a white rose (R. alba?), the House of Lancaster decided to take a red rose (R. gallica?). The winner of this war, Tudor Henry VII, merged his Lancastrian rose with the red rose of his York bride and thus created the Tudor Rose, the Rose of England.

ARTISTIC INSPIRATION

Roses have inspired artists through the centuries, their flowers appear in paintings as far back as 2000 BC. For the design of paintings and carpets roses were very important in Persia. A rose resembling Rosa sancta, (now R Richardii, similar to our B.C. native R. nutkana) appears in the famous frescoos painted on the walls of the cathedral in Ghent, Belgium.

During the 16th centuries Dutch painters popularized the rose in their famous oil paintings. The most famous rose painter of all time is the 19th century Pierre-Joseph Redoute, who commissioned by French Empress Josephine, painted over 170 of her roses. Reproductions of his botanical art can still be found in our mass produced 20th century framed prints.

The ancestors of the roses we know today originated in the wild - from the high mountains of central Europe (as with the Gallicas) to the Northern sea coasts of Japan (as with the Rugosas). Surprisingly, the rose's natural habitat does not include the southern hemisphere. Hardy and disease resistant, these early and vigorous plants can still be grown today (they are particularly good anywhere with less than perfect growing conditions and near vegetable gardens where spraying with fungicides is not desired).

The oldest garden rose is the Rosa gallica offlcinalis, the apothecary rose.
Old garden rose classes include the Albas, Centifolias and Damasks with their heady old rose fragrance. These have been long grown for their beauty and ability to grow in a most carefree manner. That they bloom only in mid-summer, as do their wild relatives, predating the later repeat flowering roses, is of little consequence in comparison with their easy care beauty and fragrance. Already in 35 AD the Roman writer Virgil wrote about the cultivationof roses and he extolled the virtues of "twice -bearing" roses, probably referring to the Autumn Damasks. But it would still be many centuries before the arrival in the West of the first true repeat-flowering roses form China from which the modern hybrid tea roses would be developed! During the Middle Ages the returning Crusaders brought with them roses from the middle East.

During these so-called Dark Ages ornamental gardening was not a priority with ordinary people: the newly imported roses were kept alive in monastery gardens. The renewed interest in the garden rose came with 19th century Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. This ambitious woman's dream was to establish a rose garden in Malmaison containing a collection of all the roses of the world. Although France was at war with every country in Europe and isolated by blockades, arrangements were made by England and France to bring to Josephine's garden newly discovered roses from China.

These unusual red and yellow roses (most roses up to that time being shades of pink, white and magenta) were then hybridized with the old roses by rose breeders around the world to create the new brightly coloured and repeat flowering Tea roses, Hybrid Perpetuals and Hybrid Teas, Noisettes, Floribundas and the colourful modern climbers we know today.

Unfortunately, however, while these newly hybridized roses had beautiful flowers to look at, often the much treasured rose fragrance and general old garden rose healthiness was lost in the breeding programs, being sacrificed for qualities valuable for showing the huge rose flowers. As well, yellow and bright red roses, hybridized from China roses brought from Asia in the late 1800s were often very susceptible to the fungal diseases - black spot and powdery mildew particularly with the conditions of our coastal climate.

NEW HYBRIDIZING BRINGS BACK OLD FRAGRANCES AND FORMS

In the last few decades, however, rose breeders have begun to cross healthier easy-care roses with fragrant old garden favourites. One such breeder, David Austin of England, each year introduces several new repeat-flowering roses, featuring at least one of the four distinct old rose fragrances and six different old rose flower forms. Other breeders are attempting to create new disease-resistant and brightly coloured roses for the environmentally conscious rose lovers who prefer not to have to spray their plants frequently to keep them healthy looking. Agriculture Canada has been hybridizing rugosa and other roses which will tolerate some of the very coldest of Canadian climates.

And so it goes on, through the ages, from relatively few "species" of wild roses from all around the world we now have literally thousands of varieties, with new ones being introduced each year. There are now roses suitable for every taste, for all levels of gardening skill and for every landscape situation and soil, light or climactic condition.

There are so many roses and books about roses that the beginning rose grower can easily become boggled by it all! But researching the development of the rose and searching for varieties which suit one's own needs and tastes is an exciting and ever more popular passion. Remembering the old-fashioned roses from the gardens of their childhood, many people try to recreate those memories by seeking out those same roses and rich fragrances to plant in their own gardens.

 

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Illuminati

Origins
Since Illuminati literally means 'enlightened ones' in Latin, it is natural that several unrelated historical groups have identified themselves as Illuminati, generally on the basis of their possessing some gnostic texts or other arcane information not generally available.

The designation illuminati was also in use from the 15th century, assumed by enthusiasts of another type, who claimed that the illuminating light came, not by being communicated from an authoritative but secret source, but from within, the result of exalted consciousness.


Alumbrados of Spain
To the former class belong the alumbrados of Spain. The historian Menendez Pelavo found the name as early as 1492 (in the form aluminados, 1498). but traced them to a Gnostic origin, and thought their views were promoted in Spain through influences from Italy. One of their earliest leaders, born in Salamanca, a labourer's daughter known as La Beata de Piedrahita, came under the notice of the Inquisition in 1511, as claiming to hold colloquies with Jesus and the Virgin Mary; some high patronage saved her from a rigorous denunciation. (Menendez Pelavo, Los Heterodoxos Espanioles, 1881, vol. v.). Ignatius Loyola, while studying at Salamanca in 1527, was brought before an ecclesiastical commission on a charge of sympathy with the alumbrados, but escaped with an admonition. Others were not so fortunate. In 1529 a congregation of naive adherents at Toledo was subjected to whippings and imprisonment. Greater rigors followed, and for about a century the alumbrados sent many victims to the Inquisition, especially at Cordoba.

Illuminés of France
The movement (under the name of Illuminés) seems to have reached France from Seville in 1623, and attained some following in Picardy when joined (1634) by Pierce Guerin, curé of Saint-Georges de Roye, whose followers, known as Gurinets, were suppressed in 1635.
A century later, another, more obscure body of Illuminés came to light in the south of France in 1722, and appears to have lingered till 1794, having affinities with those known contemporaneously in Britain as 'French Prophets', an offshoot of the Camisards.


Rosicrucians
Of different class were the so-called Illuminati, better known as Rosicrucians, who claimed to originate in 1422, but rose into notice in 1537; a secret society, that claimed to combine with the mysteries of alchemy the possession of esoteric principles of religion. Their positions are embodied in three anonymous treatises of 1614, mentioned in Richard and Giraud, Dictionnaire universel des sciences ecclésiastiques. Paris 1825.

Martinists
Later, the title Illuminati was applied to the French Martinists, that had been founded in 1754 by Martinez Pasqualis, and to their imitators, the Russian Martinists, headed about 1790 by Professor Schwartz of Moscow; both were occultist cabalists and allegorists, absorbing eclectic ideas from Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg.

The Bavarian Illuminati
History
A short-lived movement of republican freethinkers, to whose adherents the name Illuminati was given, (but who called themselves "Perfectibilists'), was founded on May 1, 1776 by the ex-Jesuit Adam Weishaupt (d. 1830), professor of canon law, and Baron Adolph von Knigge, in Ingolstadt, Bavaria (now a part of Germany). The group has also been called the Illuminati Order, the Order of the Illuminati, and the Bavarian Illuminati. In the conservative state of Bavaria, dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and the aristocracy, such an organization did not last long before it was suppressed by the powers that be. In 1784, the Bavarian government banned the Illuminati as well as the Freemasons.
Its members, drawn chiefly from Masons and former Masons, pledged to obedience to their superiors, and were divided into three main classes: The first - known as the Nursery, encompassed the ascending degrees or offices of Preparation, Novice, Minerval and Illumiatus Minor; the second, known as the Masonry, consisting of the ascending degrees of Illuminatus Major and Illuminatus dirigens, the latter also sometimes called Scotch Knight; the third, designated the Mysteries, was subdivided into the degrees of the Lesser Mysteries (Presbyter and Regent) and those of the Greater Mysteries (Magus and Rex). Relations with masonic lodges were established at Munich and Freising in 1780. The order had its branches in most countries of the European continent, but its total numbers never seem to have exceeded two thousand. The scheme had its attraction for literary men, such as Goethe and Herder, and even for the reigning dukes of Gotha and Weimar. Internal rupture preceded its downfall, which was effected by an edict of the Bavarian government in 1785.


Cultural Effect
Despite the organization's short lifespan, the 'Bavarian' Illuminati have cast a long shadow in popular history, thanks to the writings of their opponents. The lurid allegations of conspiracy theory that have colored the image of the Freemasons have practically opaqued that of the Illuminati. In 1798, a Scottish Mason and professor of natural history named John Robison published Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, in which he presented evidence of an Illuminati conspiracy striving to replace all religions and nations with humanism and a single world government, respectively.
More recently, Antony C. Sutton suggested that the secret society Skull and Bones was founded as the American branch of the Illuminati. Robert Gillete has claimed that these Illuminati ultimately intend to rule the world through assassination, bribery, blackmail, the control of banks and other financial powers, the infiltration of governments, and by causing wars and revolution to move their own people into higher positions in the political hierarchy.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, claimed they intended to spread information and the principles of true morality. He attributed the secrecy of the Illuminati to what he called "the tyranny of a despot and priests".

Both seem to agree that the enemies of the Illuminati were the monarchs of Europe and the Church. Abbe Augustin Barruel said that the French revolution (1789) was caused by the Illuminati, and later conspiracy theorists also claim the Russian Revolution (1917) to be caused by the conspiracy, although the order was officially shut down in 1790. Very few historians give credence to these views, regarding such claims as the products of over-fertile imaginations.

 

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* The Life of Adam and Eve: A more detailed story of creation than what
is found in Genesis, this book includes jealous angels, a more devious
serpent, and more information about Eve's fall from grace from her
point of view.

* The Book of Jubilees: This obscure Hebrew text offers an answer to a
question that has vexed Christians for centuries -- if Adam and Eve
only had sons, and if no other humans existed, who gave birth to
humanity? This text reveals that Adam and Eve had nine children and
that Cain's younger sister Awan became his wife. The idea that humanity
was born of incest would have been radical -- and heretical.

* The Book of Enoch: This scripture reads like a modern day action film,
telling of fallen angels, bloodthirsty giants, an earth that had become
home to an increasingly flawed humanity and a divine judgment to be
rendered though denied a place in most Western Bibles; it has been used
for centuries by Ethiopian Christians. Large portions of this book were
found as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

* The Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The only book that deals with young
Jesus, it indicates that Jesus was a strong-willed child who one
historian describes as "Dennis the Menace as God." The book reveals
that at age five, Jesus may have killed a boy by pushing push him off a
roof and then resurrected him. Perhaps too disturbing for inclusion in
the Bible, this book seems to contain traditions, also known to the
Koran.

* The Protovangelion of James: This book offers details of the life of
the Virgin Mary, her parents, her birth and her youth, stories not
found in the New Testament Gospels but was beloved by many early
Christians.

* The Gospel of Mary: This Gnostic Text reveals that Mary Magdalene may
have been an apostle, perhaps even a leading apostle, not a prostitute.
While some texts in the Bible seem to deny women a voice in the
Christian community, this texts helps spark the debate about the role
of women in the church.

* The Gospel of Nicodemus: This is the story of Jesus's trial and
execution and his descent into hell. According to this gospel the
Savior asserts his power over Satan by freeing patriarchs such as Adam,
Isaiah and Abraham from Hell.

* The Apocalypse of Peter: Peter's apocalypse suggests that there is a
way out of punishment for evildoers and implies that the threat of the
apocalypse is a way for God to scare people into living a moral life,
and committing fewer sins.


Posted by Banned From The Bible at April 10, 2004 03:12 AM
http://commonsensewonder.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=3851

 

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THE HIGH HISTORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL

THE HIGH HISTORY OF THE HOLY GRAIL

by Vincent Bridges


FWMS

Joseph Campbell, in his epic study The Masks of God places Wolfram's Parzival squarely on the dividing line between ancient and modern. Emma Jung, whose psychological insights are invaluable, identifies the Grail cycle as the beginning of the immanent spirituality of Christianity, in opposition to the more ancient transcendent view. Adolf Hitler considered the Hallows of the Grail to be an important component of his plan for world conquest. Sort of a psychic equivalent to a Panzer battalion.

The Grail would seem to be the ultimate slippery idea. Even the word itself has a half-dozen different derivations: from gradual, gradulis in Latin, to a wide plate or dish, gradule in Old French, to the really strange meanings such as Sang Real or royal blood. A persistent whiff of Sufism lingers on, along with traces of other arcane undercurrents, such as Goddess worship, "witchcraft," and contact with such megalithic concepts as landscape zodiacs.

To approach the Grail is to enter into Fairyland, the Magic Kingdom, but one such as Walt Disney could never have imagined. The Grail is, or becomes, all things to all seekers. Perhaps it is best seen as a state of mind, one in which the numinous exists in sharp and bright detail, while the mundane becomes charged with significance and meaning. If The Castle, or Temple of the Grail is the Garden, then the Angel of the Fiery Sword becomes a Grail Knight. And to enter one must simply ask: "Whom does the Grail Serve?" We are talking of nothing less than the redemption of the human condition, the true promise of Christianity, reneged on by the Church and forgotten by all but those who take up the Quest.

Like all great and essentially timeless ideas, the Grail is a product of a specific time and place, a specific and exact set of enabling conditions that allowed the emergence of this seminal myth. To understand the Grail, we must look first to history

Elenor of Aquitaine was in many ways the most remarkable woman of the middle ages. Indeed, she was perhaps one of the most amazing women of all time. Outright sovereign of Aquitaine, the richest and fairest province of France, she was married very young to the King of France. The saintly Louis seems never to have known quite what to do with this powerful, beautiful and headstrong woman. Elenor started the fashion of the Court of Love, which flourished throughout Europe and reached its peak at the turn of the thirteenth century. Elenor's daughter, Marie de Champagne, inherited her mother's love of Provencal troubadours and all the other trappings of the cult of courtly love.

Elenor and her court accompainied Louis the Young on his expedition to the Holy Land, known as the disasterous and ineffectual Second Crusade. Elenor returned from crusading and soon embarked on the great royal romance of the period. Henry Plantagenet, Henry II of England, swept her off her feet. He married her with the aid of large bribes and good friends in Rome. Their children included two of the most renowned and infamous characters in the long panorama of English history: Richard the Lion-Hearted and King John, the signer of the Magna Carta. With illustrious siblings as these, it is easy to lose track of a simple princess, no matter what her literary tastes.

Marie de Champagne deserves a better niche in history if only for her encouragement of poetry. She brought to her court the greatest storyteller of the age, Chretien de Troyes. Through Chretien the undercurrents of the Grail mythos surfaced into literature.

Not much is known about Chretien, his origins or his early works. He was born around 1130 and by 1170, he was famous as the author of a version of Ovid's Book of Love, now lost, and a version of the Tristan story which has also disappeared. Erec is his first medieval bestseller. This poem introduces in a formal way the Matter of Britain to the cosmopolitan audience at the court of Marie de Champagne, and from there passed throughout the courts of Europe. Erec sets the basic pattern for all Arthurian Romances, but though the splendors of the Celtic world are here on display, the Grail is not yet in evidence.

Chretien followed up his success with three more Arthurian tales. Cliges is a Roman myth with an Arthurian background. It wasn't all that popular. There are only two copies extant. But it did introduce certain key elements in the Matter of Britain. Cliges contains the first mention of the Round Table and the first specific mention of Camelot. Chretain may have picked up this name from Camulodunum, the Roman name for Colchester.

The Knight of the Cart and The Knight with the Lion are perhaps Chretien's masterpieces. Certainly Ywain or the knight with the lion with its marvels, strange adventures and courtly love, its finely drawn characters and well wrought unity is a masterpiece. The Knight of the Cart , our introduction to Lancelot, fares less well. The action is unexplained and unmotivated, requiring a broader canvas in order to give the causes and consequences of the adventure. The overall feeling is that of a piece of a larger work rather than a completed work of art in itself.

We can imagine Chretien working on just that problem of scope in the early 1180's.While Chretien produced most of the Arthurian stage dressing that would define the very concept of Romance over the next three hundred years, the Grail has yet to appear.

Chretien's last work, left unfinished at his death, was Perceval, or the History of the Grail. With this uneven masterpiece, Chretien plants the seed germ of the spiritual qualities that will, within only thiry years, become the driving force behind works as unique as Wolfram's Parzival and Walter de Mapp's Queste del Saint Graal.

While the scope of Perceval, or the History of the Grail is broad enough to encompass the entire medieval world view, it is riddled with difficulties and inconsistencies. Chretien himself claimed that he was merely reworking the material that he had found in an old manuscript. Perhaps the marvels and strange doings of his Celtic original simply proved too much for Chretien's more down to earth approach. At any rate, his version ends after Gawain's adventure of the Perilous Bed.

We can be sure that Chretien began his last work, commissioned by Phillip of Flanders, with great enthusiasm. Chretien refers to the story as the greatest ever told in any court. His opening scenes are full of color and verve. He tells of his hero's blunders and gaucheries with a keen comic sensitivity of effect. He invests the encounter with the Fisher King with just the right amount of awe and reverence mixed in with the mystery and strangeness. And Chretien is equally successful with the startling appearance of the Loathly Damsel and her violent denunicaion of Perceval, whose growth from boyish boorishness to knightly grace has been well drawn and realized.

With the shift of narrative focus to Gawain, the tale begins to unravel. By the time the story returns to Perceval, it is obvious that Chretien is deeply confused and that some important concept concerning this "graal" has been lost or misunderstood.

But the clues are there, painted in broad strokes in the Grail procession scene. To understand the mystery of the Grail, it will be necessary to have the outline of Chretien's scene in the Grail Castle firmly in mind. Our first glimpse of the Grail offers many guideposts in the tangled thickets of theological and eschatological speculations to follow. Chretien faithfully followed his original, even when he didn't understand it.

Perceval's early life echoes the boyhoods of the great Celtic Solar Heroes Culchuin and Finn. His entry to the great hall of Camelot is taken from the tale of Kulwich in the Welsh Mabinogion. After his knighting, Perceval sets out in search of further adventures and arrives at the castle of the Fisher King. The Fisher King presides over a vast, empty hall, large enough for four hundred men. An old man is seated on a couch pulled close to the central fire. The Fisher King presents Perceval with a Sword, a richly appointed weapon, a marvel that "could not break save only in one peril which no one knew save him who forged and tempered it."

A procession passes through the hall. First, a squire carries a Spear dripping spackles of blood onto the floor. Two squires with ten-branched candlesticks follow. A beautiful maiden enters carrying a "Graal" which blazes so brightly that it puts out the light of the candles and the stars. Following her is another maiden carrying a talleors, a casket or tabernacle. Perceval watches all this but fails to ask its meaning.

In the morning, the castle is empty and disappears as soon as Perceval moves across the drawbridge. He comes upon a lady holding a headless body. She informs Perceval that all could have been healed if he had only asked of the grail. She also tells him that his sword will break in a careless moment, but that it can be renewed in the lake where the smith, Trebuchet, dwells.

On the surface, this is no stranger than any other marvelous encounter in any of a dozen Celtic adventure tales. It is only when the hermit, whom Perceval visits for confession after five years of godless adventure, begins to explain and chastise that we sense that something is missing or misunderstood.

Why does the hermit rebuke Perceval so severely for not asking of the Grail when he was merely following the teachings of his chivalrous mentor? And, in any case, Perceval did not know that he should ask, or that there was any penalty for not asking. It somehow doesn't seem quite fair.

But even more disturbing is the hermit's assertion that the "Graal" carried by the beautiful maiden did not contain a salmon or lamprey as Chretien implied it should, but simply a consecrated wafer intended for the King's father. Church orthodoxy specifically excluded women from serving in such a priestly capacity. Yet the Grail Maiden passes unexplained. At any rate, a dish wide enough to hold a large fish seems a strange choice to hold a smallish wafer. And, if its purpose is simply sacramental, why does it accompany each course?

The old hermit's explanations are more tantalizing than satisfying, and suggests that Chretien found the need to alibi and cover over his religious tracks. The idea of a miraculous dish is an ancient Celtic motif. The later romances give the Fisher King the name of Bron, a close proximity to the ancient Welsh Bran, whose cauldron supplied the needs of any and everyone. Bran was wounded in the foot, echoing the Fisher King's injury, a spear wound through the thigh.

It's a mistake to assume, as does Professor Loomis and other authorities, that Chretien simply misinterpreted Bran's horn, corz, which also had miraculous abilities, as cors, or body, thereby connecting the dish and the body of Christ which accidently created the spiritually potent image of the Holy Grail. This pun is definitely a clue to the real intention, but it is hardly an accident.

And there is still the matter of a woman celebrating a form of the Mass, something unheard of in orthodox tradition. Where could this have come from?

To simply say "from Celtic sources" is to beg the point. For all the pagan influences in the Grail story, it is still almost numinously Christian. But it is a Christianity far removed from the corruption and politics of Rome. This doesn't explain the eruption of Grail literature in the thirty or so years between the major Romances. For that, a broader perspective is needed.

These thirty years, from roughly 1185 to 1215, marked, in many ways, the nadir of medieval Christianity. The papal squabbles of the mid-century, along with the general sense of discouragment after the failure of the Second Crusade, created a religious vacuum, into which more "heretical" forms of Christianity stepped. These heresies took root so quickly because of the contrast they presented with the church of Rome. These priests lived with and cared about their flock. It was common for prelates in Rome to spent their whole tenure in absentee, and the lower clergy was often as venal and corrupt as the local landowner.

The decline of the church was given an extra push in the 1160's and 70's by the wide circulation of Abelairdian rationalism. Abelaird, best remembered today for his romance with his pupil Heloise, discussed the superstitions of the church with such clear-headedness that many intellectuals agreed that change was necessary, even essential.

If the second crusade has been disaapointing, then the fall of Jerusalem in the autumn of 1187 was devastating. It was seen as a sign of God's disfavor. A crusade was proclaimed, joined by such personages as the Kings of Germany, France and England. Frederick Barbarrossa died along the way and even though Elenor's golden child, Richard I of England, pursued the crusade with all the force of his fiery personality, Jerusalem remained in the hands of the infidels.

Richard, Heart-of-the-Lion, was something of a troubadour himself and gave his own stamp of approval to the new mode of romance. He seemed to literally embody the Matter of Britain and its chivalric traditions. We can be sure that the new poetry of the grail accompanied the crusaders because Richard's nephew, Marie's son, Henry of Champagne was elected King of Jerusalem. It is tempting to envisage the poet Gautier de Danans chanting his continuation of Chretien's masterwork in the great hall of Acre, with Richard and his Queens, his sister Johanna and his wife Berengaria, nodding their approval.

In 1191, the whole of the Arthurian tradition was verified by the monks of Glastonbury. Staking their claim as the "Vale of Avalon," the good monks disinterred the body of a Bronze Age chieftain and his queen. The bodies were supposedly marked with a cross identifying them and King Arthur and Guinevere.

Naturally, this created an international sensation, and along with it, an appetite for stories about Arthur, his knights and their adventures in search of the Grail. There were several good reasons for this sudden discovery. First and foremost stands the political reason. The Plantagenet conquest of Wales was still quite recent and the nationalist guerrillas, to give them a modern appellation, believed that Arthur, rex quondum et futurum, the once and future king would rise from his rocky tomb in Gwenydd and ride to battle against the invaders. It was politically sound to produce Arthur's body, safely buried on English soil.

But, looking closer, there is something very interesting about Glastonbury's claims on Arthur and the Grail. Tradition has it that Joseph of Arimathea brought Christianity, and possibly the Virgin Mother herself, to Britain within a decade of Jesus' death. The first Christian church in the world was then the small circular wattled structure at Glastonbury.

The Celtic Church, which was responsible for bringing culture, indeed one might say even civilization, back to Europe after the fall of Rome, survived at least until the eighth century. It survived even longer in the wilds of Ireland and Scotland. We find Robert the Bruce being crowned by a Culdee bishop as late as the early fourteenth century.

Glastonbury functioned as if it were a school, or spiritual center of some sort. Its place was high on the list of Celtic Church pilgrimages and from the earliest times was associated with the Virgin Mother. Arthur was associated at an early era by his adoption of the image of the Virgin as a personal banner. (See Gildas and Geoffrey of Monmouth). If Arthur has an actual historical focus, it is the late 400's, just after the last legions were recalled to Rome and before the overwhelming wave of Saxon invasions in the early 500's. Arthur at this point is a "Restitutor" or rescuer of Roman civilization. His choice of the Virgin, rather than the crucifix of Rome, indicates that along with restoring the Empire, Arthur intended to change the focus away from apostolic Catholicism toward the more inspiration oriented Celtic Church. That he failed is perhaps the great tragedy of the Dark Ages.

At any rate, it is not hard to see the glimmers of this earlier and more spiritual form of Christianity as the undercurrent of ideas that emerged as Chretien's "graal." The connection is never made directly, accept in the later romances, but the Matter of Britain was basically a front for the Celtic Church. In this seemingly secular form, the spiritual motiffs of a truly gnostic Christianity emerged in the intellectual current of the age. The Roman Church neither encouraged nor discouraged the Grail Romances, even though it was obvious that an earlier and possibly heretical form of Christianity was being represented. As we shall see, the Church was not above persecuting heretics, but there was absolutely no attempt to discredit the Grail stories.

Perhaps the reason for this is that even the Roman Church found it hard not to believe that the origins of the Celtic Church went back to the very family of Christ. "Royal Blood," indeed.

Around 1200, Robert de Borron, following the popularity of the continuations of Chretein, produced Joseph of Arimathea, the prequel to the series the ties it all very neatly into the Celtic Church. He reveals the themes of a hidden or inner teaching given to Joseph after Christ's resurrection. These teachings appear to center around the Grail, here called a Chalice, and consitute the heart of the "mysteries." Mention is also made of a journey westward, to the "Vale of Avaron (Avalon?)" and provision is made for the future hero, Percival, who will fulfill the Quest.

There is a certain murkiness to this story, perhaps as a result of trying to tell the important part (for those with ears to hear) and still stay within certain defined limits that would allow the Roman Church to ignore the tale. Things had changed by 1200. A powerful Pope, Innocent III, had regained the upper hand in his struggles with the Holy Roman Empire and began to turn his attention to unifying the whole world under his spiritual rule. By the grace of God, of course.

And this led directly to the most disgraceful incidents in the history of the Roman Church. The Fourth Crusade and the Crusade against the Cathars were waged against fellow Christians. The Fourth Crusade ended with the sack of Constantinople. The Crusaders, tricked by those crafty and godless Venetians, fell upon the first city of Christendom and plundered and sacked with a vengence. The Knights Templars found the shroud, whose adoration would produce charges of idol worship eventually resulting in their downfall. Innocent III rejoiced in the "unification of the Church."

But not quite. A resurgence of a gnostic heresy in the south of France threatened to become the majority religion and Innocent responded in the manner he knew best: call out the troops. The extermination of heretics in the south of France would continue for half a century, long after Innocent III went to his just rewards in whatever afterlife he actually believed in.

Why exterminate the Cathars, or the Perfecti as they called themselves. Why not also attack the Celtic Church which was also active at the same time?

It boils down to a question of legitimacy. If Rome was afraid to open the question of the Celtic Church, it was because of the nagging suspicion that the Celtic Church had the greater claim to legitimacy and could just possibly prove it. There were connections between the Perfecti and the Celtic Church. By concentrating on the Perfecti, heresy could be severely rebuked as an object lesson that would force at least superficial adherence to Rome.

The Cathars became scapegoats for the whole underground current of Celtic/Grail/Gnostic Christian survivals. It seems to have worked. For by 1220, around the time the first wave of anti-cathar crusading was winding down, Grail Romances were falling out of favor. Other than Malory, whose rendition of Walter de Mapp's 1220 Queste de Saint Greal has become our story book Grail, there is only the "Elucidation" of Chretien by an anonymous author. This is a half hearted attempt to give another explanation for all these mystical goings on. It is unsuccessful and is often not included in the Grail texts.

Clearly, the Grail had a specific significance for those who listened so avidly to these stories of wonder and marvel. The grail's significance is simply its connection with the Holy Family. The Grail suggests in the strongest possible terms that another route to salvation -- one that had nothing to do with the Church of Rome -- was available around the turn of the thirteenth century.

This is most clearly seen in the two most unique of all Grail legends, that of the "Perlesvaus" and Wolfram's Parzival. Wolfram's tale is almost devoid of any mention of the clergy. His Parzival finds grace through knightly prowess in pursuit of a gnostic, or experiential faith. His Grail is the stone that fell from heaven. This "stone" would eventually become, over the centuries, the philosopher's stone of the alchemist.

The "Perlesvaus" ties the matter to Glastonbury and may even have been written there shortly after the discovery of Arthur's Tomb. This story differs somewhat from other Grail legends, but its connection with the megalithic zodiac around Glasonbury, which Katherine Maltwood identified in the 1930's from a close reading of the "Perlesvaus," suggests the area's older connection with the gateway to Anwen, the Celtic underworld where the original cauldron of Bran was hidden. There is even an ancient Welsh poem about Arthur's trip to Anwen to capture the cauldron.

The pattern is clear. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, the Grail Romances offered a direct challenge to the authority of Rome, one that Rome could not answer for fear of exposing her own shaky position. Innocent III felt strong enough, after the fall of Constantinople, to turn the iron grip of Christian chivalry on the most exposed and concentrated group of heretics hoping to quiet the lot of them. Indeed, the fear and horror of the Cathar Crusade did put the fear of the Pope back into the hearts of Christians everywhere.

And if the Celtic heresy could not be brought to the sword directly, then the land of England could be put under interdiction, a terrible form of religious coercion in which the church effectively goes on strike. It will not marry or bury or hold services while under interdiction. Innocent III, for good measure, also excommunicated King John. All of this was resolved by England becoming a Papal Fief for a few years. The Celtic Church gradually faded away over the next century.

The image of the Grail, though, did not fade away. The Matter of Britain still retained its popularity, though without the spiritual overtones. The spiritual current went underground, surfacing in the Renaissance, and then again in the Rosecrucians, and again in the nineteenth century.

Wolfram says that to know the Grail you must "learn your ABC's without the aid of black magic." Robert de Borron's Joseph is quite explicit. The mystery of the Grail is the inner teaching. Jesus taught Joseph strange words to vibrate over the cup that held the holy blood. This attempt to clear away the underbrush of the Grail texts has shown that the source of the Grail is that strange mixture of Celtic and Christian beliefs that developed in the west of England and Ireland before the Empire crumbled. It was defended by Arthur, and almost brought by him on to the stage of European history at just that juncture when the politics of the Empire would have allowed a completely new direction, a completely new version based on the inner teaching of the Christian mysteries.

By the eighth century, the time of Charles the Great, Rome had established her death grip on the religious community, and Charles, out of guilt, or through the trickery of the Pope, allowed himself to accept the Imperial Throne from the hands of the Patriarch of Rome. The fraudulent Donation of Constantine, which supported the temporal power of the Church, clinched the situation. From that point on, Rome was locked in a desperate struggle against the various gnostic survivals, some of whose claim to be the real "Church" was considerably better than Rome's. To admit any other claim was to lose the position of defender of orthodoxy; for if there were many churches, than Rome was not THE church, catholic and universal.

This power struggle would color the next seven hundred years, ending finally with Luthor's thesis nailed to the door of the seminary. That rupture could not be healed, even by the sword.

In the Grail, we see, even at this late date, the radiant quality of that early church. The importance of the Grail, for us now, as we plunge into the next cycle of spiritual evolution, lies in its symbolic nature. Within the Grail can be found a synthesis of all western mystical and magical traditions. It is the source of that underground stream of meaning that flows through the occult and esoteric teachings of the last two thousand years.

The Grail is all things to all people, and to all it is The Mystery. Omnia quia sunt, lumina sunt.

by Vincent Bridges

 

[shereads]

SnP, there are some fascinating ideas here. I've been curious, and you've saved me some research. Thank you.

I can't help but point out that you're missing one of the essential Grail references:
Python.

King Arthur: "We come for the Grail!"

Frenchman: "Grail? No thanks, we've already got one...

...You silly English k-nigghits."

 

[sweetnpetite]

SnP, there are some fascinating ideas here. I've been curious, and you've saved me some research. Thank you.

I can't help but point out that you're missing one of the essential Grail references:
Python.

King Arthur: "We come for the Grail!"

Frenchman: "Grail? No thanks, we've already got one...

...You silly English k-nigghits."

Never seen Monty Python.

I'm glad you enjoyed the posts. I thought I was going to get shot I haven't read through it all yet myself. But I do plan too.

BTW, all of that was posted by various people at the same site (which I referenced once in there) so, it's good for background, but I can't exactly vouch for it's reliablity. Anybody who wants to debate any thing from with, help yourself, lol.

Of course if anyone thinks we are straying to far from discussing the book itself (and you actually want to participate, not just complain feel free to chew me out as well

As for me, I love to extend the information I find in the books I read and use them as a jumping off point for my next 'obsession'

 

[sweetnpetite]

This is from one of the reviews I posted:

Authentic History Requires Proof
First, the book wants readers to believe “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (p. 1), but the facts do not seem to support this assertion. For example, the book confidently states that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) embedded codes in the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and other masterpieces to secretly communicate and safeguard the real story behind the rise of organized Christianity. But scholars do not seem to share the book’s confidence. “I think the idea that Leonardo da Vinci had secret information passed down for 40 generations that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child is entertaining, but it is not history,” John Martin of the Renaissance Society of America told News-Press.com.


This kind of thing drives me nuts. The author states that the discriptions of artwork, etc are accurate, not that the interpretations are See how this reviewer twists the author's words to make it seem like he's presenting as fact, what he has actually clearly labled as speculative fiction?

So annoying. I wonder if they intentionally twisted his words like that, or if they are just not smart enough to know the difference?