Barber's argument, though reasonable, seems to us weakened by his evident desire not to be a ‘romantic’ and thus not to find a conspiracy in anything. In the case of organisations like the Templars and the Cathars, which were forced to be secretive and conspiratorial by the circumstances of the times, such a policy could be a mistake. If, for example, Cathar knights after Montségur had sought and been granted shelter by the Templars would we honestly expect to find records of this – let alone records of the transfer of any ‘treasure’? Would these hypothetical fugitives, joining a religious military order that was already notorious for its secrecy and weirdness by 1244, have left a paper trail for the Inquisition, and later historians, to follow? It seems most unlikely.
On the other hand the hypothesis that the Templars were increasingly influenced by Cathar-dualist ideas from the mid-13th century onwards has much to recommend it – not least because it makes better sense than Barber's explanation of the charges of heresy that were brought against the order in the early 14th century. The reader will recall that one of the sensational indictments was that Templar initiates were required to spit on or break crosses. Such behaviour, though seemingly bizarre or diabolical, is entirely consistent with the Cathar religion which denied the physical incarnation of Christ, disbelieved in the Crucifixion, and regarded veneration of the cross as a form of idolatry and torture-worship.52
Seen from the perspective of the Inquisition – and of the French crown – the huge influx of heavily-armed and battle-proven Templars returning to the Languedoc in the last years of the 13th century after the loss of the Holy Land may well have looked threatening. Depending on the level of suspicion with which the permanent Templar population of the region was already regarded – fuelled perhaps by rumours that fugitive Cathars had joined Templar ranks – this quantum leap in the order's local military strength could well have been regarded as extremely dangerous by the secular and religious powers. Their suspicions, moreover, are likely to have been intensified by what they would have regarded as the most unwelcome signs of a Cathar revival led by the Perfectus Pierre Autier that began in 1299 (see Chapter Seven).
Once all these factors are taken into account, we propose that the perceived threat of a renascent Catharism supported by the armoured might of a Templar order now ‘lost to heresy’ is sufficient on its own to explain the sudden move that Philip and the Church made against the order in 1307. Whether there was any real substance to the perceived threat is another matter, but it is inconceivable that king and pope would have conspired to bring down the Templars at this exact moment when Catharism was in its death struggle without connecting the two matters together in their minds.53 That is not to say that greed for the wealth of the Templars played no part in their decisions and actions. With a man like Philip, greed always played a part. But our point is that greed was not the only factor, nor perhaps even the main factor. What happened to the Templars between their arrest in 1307 and the burning of their last Grand Master in 1314 may be best understood as it was understood then – i.e. as yet another battle in the war against heresy and social revolution that the Church had waged since the time of Constantine the Great.
Elements of the Templar heresy
An argument can be made against any kind of secret association between the Cathars and the Templars on the grounds that their beliefs were fundamentally incompatible. While the latter took pride in the Old Testament symbolism of the Temple of Solomon, the former abhorred and opposed the Old Testament as the book of the evil demiurge.
This objection, though obvious, is irrelevant to the hypothesis being put forward here. We are not claiming that the Templars were influenced by Catharism in the early years of their existence – when they occupied the Temple Mount in Jerusalem between 1119 and 1187 and adopted the octagonal floor-plan of the Dome of the Rock as their fundamental symbol. Our proposal is that this influence may have begun to be felt during the 12th century, through the many Templar preceptories in Occitania, but that it did not have a significant impact until well into the 13th century when, as several historians believe, fugitive Cathar knights were absorbed into the order. We speculate that the process was accelerated after 1290, with the influx of returning Templars from the Holy Land, but that before it could reach critical mass it was interrupted by the pre-emptive strike of Philip the Fair and Clement V in 1307.
Another claim that we are not making is that the Templars had become Cathars. Our hypothesis is that by 1307 Cathar dualism was one amongst a number of ingredients in a probably multi-faceted Templar heresy that had brought together a potpourri of seeming incompatible religious ideas. In a way the heretics who the Templars most remind us of are not so much the Cathars as the warrior sect of Christian Gnostics known as the Paulicians (see Chapter Five) who displayed the same fearlessness and willingness to kill. It is also widely recognised that the unique and idiosyncratic Templar religion was tinged with aspects of esoteric Islam and mystical Judaism that the order had picked up in the Holy Land.
The Judaic element meshed particularly well with the Knights’ own original obsession with the Temple of Solomon and would have continued to be available to them in Occitania through the large and long-established Jewish communities that we know were also resident there at the time. These communities had an honoured place in Occitan society in the 12th and 13th centuries until the Albigensian Crusades destroyed the region's heterodox and tolerant way of life forever. Acclaimed schools of Talmudic law flourished at Narbonne, Lunel and Beaucaire and there is a report from 1160 that Jewish students travelled from ‘distant lands’ to study at them.54
In addition, as we saw in Chapter Two, the important branch of esoteric Judaism and mystical cosmic speculation known as the Cabala was developed amongst the scholarly Jews of Occitania's coastal cities between in the 12th and 13th centuries55 – again overlapping with the Cathars and the Templars in the same area. We cited Benjamin of Tudela's 12th century description of a Jew at Lunel who had ‘discarded all worldly business, studied day and night, kept fasts, and never ate meat’.56 Since this suggests that Cathar ideas about how we should live in the world and what we are doing here had begun to influence the Occitanian Jews, why should not the occult philosophy of the Cabala, elaborated by Occitania's Jewish savants, have likewise influenced the Cathars – and the Templars?
Emanations and the Sephirothic Tree
Catharism was a revival, which took root in Occitania in the 12th century (and in the Balkans somewhat earlier) of Christian Gnostic heresies that had last flourished in Palestine and Alexandria in the first four centuries AD. It is a remarkable coincidence that Cabalism likewise is a revival, which took root in Occitania in the 12th century, of schools of Jewish mysticism that had last flourished in Palestine and in Alexandria in those same first four centuries.57 And although the revival of Hermeticism did not come until the recovery of the Hermetic texts in the 15th century, those texts too had their origin in those first four centuries – and, moreover, in the same predominantly Alexandrian milieu that nourished Gnosticism and the schools of Jewish mystical speculation.
A central concept shared by all the dualist religions that we traced in Part I is that of emanation. In the simplest possible terms it is conceived of as a conscious or unconscious creative act of the pure and unassailable spiritual godhead forming manifestations of him/her/itself that then pursue an independent existence. The Gnostics of the first four centuries AD called these emanations eons. They were ranked in order of their degree of selfknowledge and they were frequently given abstract characters such as ‘Silence’, ‘Intellect’, ‘Truth’, ‘Wisdom’, and so on.58
Together the godhead and the eons formed the Pleroma – literally the ‘Fullness’ – the perfect group. The process that led to the creation of the world resulted from a fall within the Pleroma usually caused by curiosity or desire on the part of one of the eons.59 The reader will recall that in some Gnostic schemes Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, was portrayed as the fallen eon
, in others he was even less than that, reduced to the status of an emanation of an emanation – smart enough to create the material world but too stupid to remember where he had come from and what his own small role really was in the scheme of things.60 Likewise the Cathars saw Jesus not as the physical and material ‘son of God’, as the Christians did, but as a divine emanation.61
This concept of emanation is also fundamental to the Cabala. Here the text on which the 12th and 13th century Occitanian speculation was based was the Sepher Yetzirah (‘Book of Creation’), a Hebrew treatise on cosmogony and cosmology originally compiled in the third century AD.62 This work recounts a creative act on the part of the godhead manifesting ‘in ten distinct stages of emanation’ corresponding with the numbers one to ten.63 These ten emanations, which combine alchemically with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet – the ‘language of God’ – are known as the Sephiroth. Their order and qualities are as follows (1) Keter Elyon (Supreme Crown) or Ratzon (Will); (2) Chochmah (Wisdom); (3) Binah (Intelligence); (4) Chesed (Love) or Gedullah (Greatness); (5) Gevurah (Power) or Din (Judgement); (6) Tiferet (Beauty) or Rachamim (Compassion); (7) Netzach (Lasting Endurance); (8) Hod (Majesty); (9) Yesod Olam (Foundation of the World) or Tzaddik (Righteous One); (10) Malchut (Kingdom) or Atarah (Diadem) or Shekhina (Feminine Divine Presence).64
As the Cabala was developed in the 12th and 13th centuries the Jewish mystics of Occitania organized these ten Sephiroth into ‘a specific archetypal pattern’ usually drawn as interlinked by a complex network of straight ‘branches’, or ‘pathways’, or ‘columns’ or ‘pillars’: The pattern thus called forth is the model on which everything that is to come into manifestation is based. It has been named the Image of God, but it is more generally known as the Tree of Life.65
One might think of it as a diagram of the DNA structure of reality – intended not as a literal ‘map of reality’ or representation of ‘what reality is made of’ but as a mandala66 or talisman to be used for focused mental exercise through which knowledge of the true nature of things can be reached.
Sephirothic Tree and Temple of Solomon
Like other mandalas, the Sephirothic ‘Tree of Life’ is a geometrical pattern. It features three main vertical columns or pillars on which the ten Sephiroth representing the emanations of God are fixed like glass balls on a Christmas tree. There is a significant interpenetration of symbolism here with Freemasonry. As we saw in Chapter Thirteen, Freemasons generally represent the Temple of Solomon by two pillars or columns, known as Boaz and Jachin (‘wisdom’ and ‘power’) with the open corridor between the two pillars often considered as a ‘third’ pillar. Such imagery of two or three pillars, so close to the basic structure of the Tree of Life, is frequently evoked in Masonic illustrations and certificates.
It is also commonly found in Rosicrucian symbolism67 and some researchers have even detected it on the engraved title-page of Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning. 68 This engraving, which appears in the 1640 edition, shows two pillars and beyond them the open ocean with a ship sailing away.69 At the top of the left pillar is the symbol of the Sun and at the top of the right pillar is the symbol of the Moon – i.e. like the pillars in the Tree of Life they are surmounted by globes. But this is also, unmistakably, the same motif which is often seen in Masonic illustrations of Solomon's Temple, with the pillars Boaz and Jachin. One globe represents the visible world lit by the Sun, and the other globe the invisible or occult world under the glow of the Moon i.e. the secret world. Two hands, one extended from each of the globes, are clasped in what clearly seems to be a ‘Masonic handshake’. We are not alone in noting that this whole arrangement is suggestive of a Sephirothic Tree of Life that branches out into ‘Wisdom’, ‘Power’, ‘Intelligence’ and so forth.70
This same general pattern using symbols to denote the various Masonic ‘virtues’ and the many paths to their attainment can be easily discerned in the so-called tracing boards used by Freemasons to this day in rituals likened to entry to the ‘spiritual Temple of Solomon’. At the foot of these ‘tracing boards’ is to be seen a representation of the two pillars, Boaz and Jachin, beyond them some sort of shrine, probably symbolising the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple, and often represented by a pentagram or a ‘Blazing Star’. Behind the pentagram/star device are spread a variety of Masonic symbols the whole culminating at the top of the tracing board where we find the Supreme Being represented either by a crown (Keter in the Cabalistic Tree of Life also means ‘Crown’), or by the ‘all seeing eye’, or a glowing pyramid.
That such symbolism is to be directly associated with the Tree of Life is confirmed by the preparatory information given to Masonic candidates for the so-called 30th degree of the Scottish Rite, also known as the Knight Kadosh degree, where a Sephirothic Tree is shown to the candidate along with a textual explanation of its symbolic use. According to Masonic historian Robert Lomas: In the preparatory section ritual of the Knight Kadosh, (the 30th degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite and the first degree of the Chivalric Series), the Candidate is given this information. This division of the ten Sephiroth into three triads was arranged into a form called by the Kabbalists the Kabbalistic Tree, or the Tree of Life (as shown in the following Tracing Board) In this diagram the vertical arrangement of the Sephiroth is called – ‘Pillars’. Thus the four Sephiroth in the centre are called the Middle Pillar the three on the right, the Pillar of Mercy and the three on the left, the Pillar of Justice.71
In chapter one of the Sepher Yetzirah it is stated that: Ten are the numbers of the ineffable Sephiroth, ten not nine, ten not eleven. Learn this wisdom and be wise in the understanding of it; investigate these numbers and draw knowledge from them; fix the design in its purity, and pass from it to its creator seated on his throne …72
The Sepher Yetzirah also speaks of ‘the 32 most occult and wonderful paths of wisdom’ on which ‘the Lord of Hosts engraved His Name’. These ‘32’ paths, pillars or columns in the design represent the ‘10 Sephiroth’ and the ‘22 letters’ which are ‘the foundation of all things’.73 Thus the Sephirothic Tree, with its ‘22’ paths and ‘10 emanations’ also mystically connotes the number ‘32’. In Scottish Freemasonry this represents the 32 ‘degrees’ that must be taken (i.e. ‘pathways’ that must be followed) in order to reach the door of full Masonic enlightenment – the ultimate 33rd degree. The link we make here is confirmed by the 33rd degree Scottish Rite author, Charles Sunmer Lobingier, who, in 1929, was commissioned by the Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite in Washington, DC to write an official history of this Masonic order: A later feature of the Kabala is the thirty-two paths of wisdom. The number is obtained by adding the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (twenty-two) to ten Sephiroth, and here we doubtless have the origin of the number of degrees as formulated by the Grand Constitution [of the Scottish Rite] …74
The paradoxical Kircher
The belief that divine principles, emanations or archetypes can be made manifest in a ‘temple’ or ‘house’ of God – both in the material and in the spiritual sense – is at the very heart of the Tree of Life concept. But much earlier the ancient Egyptians also designed their temples with precisely such a purpose in mind – think, for instance, of the great sacred precinct of Amun at Karnak-Luxor.
The notion that the Egyptian esoteric design of temples could in some way be connected to the Sephirothic Tree was developed as early as the 17th century by the Hermetic-Cabalist and philosopher Athanasius Kircher in his book Oedipus Aegyptiacus. In this work Kircher, who was also (or seemed to be) a devout Jesuit, goes so far as to argue that all religions and all knowledge of the divine originally came from Egypt.75 Joscelyn Godwin, professor of music at Colgate University in New York, is a world-renowned authority on Kircher and has this to say: Kircher derives all the wisdom of the Jews from Egypt, transmitted through the initiate Moses. In The Tree of the Sephiroth we have the primary metaphysical symbol of the Hebrew Cabalists. It shows ten invariable archetypes linked to each o
ther by twenty-two paths corresponding to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Since the Tree is a diagram of the utmost universality, it may be used as a key to the working of every level of the Universe … On the cosmological level, the lowest seven Sephiroth are the seven Chaldaean planets, and the upper triad, according to Kircher, the spheres of the fixed stars …76
In 1621, Athanasius Kircher, then a young novice in the Jesuit order, was forced to flee Germany – his homeland – because of the outbreak of the Thirty Years War He eventually found his way into France and joined the Jesuit college at Avignon. A brilliant mathematician and accomplished linguist, Kircher developed an insatiable interest in all things Egyptian and in 1635 was given a post at the Jesuit college in Rome to study hieroglyphs. In 1638 Kircher was made professor of mathematics, but his scientific interests were wide and varied. His fame became such that scholars from all over the world corresponded with him and many came to see him in Rome, such as the English inventor William Gascoignes and the French painter Nicolas Poussin, to whom he taught perspectives.77 Kicher was a keen collector of antiquities, and was to establish one of Europe's first museums, the Museo Kircheriano which some compared ‘with Elias Ashmole's foundation in Oxford of the Ashmolean Museum.’78
Like Giordano Bruno before him Kircher was an all-out ‘Egyptian’ Hermetist who ‘regarded Egyptian idolatry and polytheism as the source, not only of Greek and Roman religion, but of the later Hebrews.’79 Kircher also believed that Egypt was the source of all civilisations and, more importantly, that all ancient philosophies, and especially Hebrew Cabala, had been ‘derived from the Egyptian wisdom’ handed down in the Hermetic writings.80 Because of this, Frances Yates calls Kircher the ‘most notable descendant of the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition’. Yates also comments that he was ‘much preoccupied with Isis and Osiris as the chief gods of Egypt.’81 In his Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Kircher reaches the following conclusion: The divine Dionysius testifies that all created things are nothing else but mirrors which reflect to us the rays of divine wisdom. Hence the wise men of Egypt feigned that Osiris, having given charge of all things to Isis, permeated invisibly to the whole world. What else can this signify save that the power of the invisible God penetrates intimately into all?82
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