by Mark Booth
THE CHURCH GREW IN POWER AND WEALTH. It wanted to be the sole keeper of the keys to the Kingdom. The Church had earlier emphasized that an individual has but one life by suppressing teachings on reincarnation and had emphasized one god by suppressing knowledge of its astronomical roots. Now it emphasized the unity of the disembodied parts of the human being. In 869 at the Eighth Ecumenical Council, the Church effectively closed the door to the spirit worlds by abolishing the ancient distinction between the vegetable dimension of the soul and the animal dimension of the spirit. Soul and spirit were declared to be the same thing, and the result of this was that the spirit worlds, formerly encountered in the Mass, would come to seem an empty abstraction.
Experience of the spirit worlds was replaced by dogma to be accepted on authority.
Meanwhile, a vital Islamic influence, part intellectual, part spiritual, continued to flow into Europe through centres of scholarship like Toledo and Sicily. The study of mathematics, geometry and natural science, inspired in part by the Arabs’ translation and preservation of the works of Aristotle, as well as astronomy and astrology, spread northwards, leading to the formation of the first universities in Europe, based on the Islamic model. It led, too, to the arabesques of Gothic architecture, influenced by the intricate vegetal forms of mosque architecture.
IN THE NORTH PORCH OF THE CATHEDRAL at Chartres, founded in 1028, stands Melchizedek bearing the Grail. The astrology that Islam was bringing back to Europe, after it had been driven out several hundred years earlier by Rome, can be seen in the symbolism of the west porch — the fish of Pisces and the twin Templar Knights of Gemini. The pediment also has a fine example of a vesica piscis, a Third Eye that sees the spirit worlds coming through into the material world.
Chartres is a fusion in stone of Islamic mysticism, ancient Celtic spirituality and Neoplatonic Christianity. Atop a hill honeycombed with ancient tunnels and caves, it is believed to have been built on a site sacred to the Mother Goddess. A black virgin, resonant of the kinship between Isis, mother of the Sun god, and Mary, mother of Jesus Christ, can still be seen in the crypt.
Set into the floor of the nave is the most famous labyrinth in Europe. Built in 1200 it is some forty feet in diameter. Before it was taken up to help make canons in the French Revolution, a bronze plaque in the centre depicted Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur.
You must reverse direction seven times but never tread the same path. This spiral represented in two dimensions is depicted here, based on an original drawing by Botticelli.
Of course labyrinths and mazes are ancient pagan artefacts, remains of which are found not only at Knossos but at Hawara in Egypt and in the many open-air labyrinths and mazes found cut in the turf in Ireland, Britain and Scandinavia. Many other Christian churches had labyrinths before the eighteenth century, but these were destroyed because of their pagan associations.
One of the burial mounds at Newgrange in Ireland was still called ‘the spiral castle’ by the locals in the 1950s, because of a spiral carved by the entry portal. The expression ‘our king has gone to the spiral castle’ was an idiomatic way of saying that he had died.
This is the key to understanding the secret symbolism of the labyrinth and of Chartres Cathedral itself. If you enter the labyrinth and follow its track on foot you find yourself moving in a spiral motion, first to the left then curving back to the right as you move towards the centre. Pilgrims following its route are engaged in a dance like the dance of Jesus described in the Acts of St John. The aim, as in all initiatory activity, is to enter an altered state in which the spirit journeys up through the spirit worlds, experiencing the after-death journey while still alive.
Ariadne, who intercedes to help save Theseus, is, in the Chartrean context, Mary who gave birth to the Sun king and through whose intercession we may give birth to our own higher selves.
The labyrinth at Chartres can therefore be seen as a sort of mandala or aid to meditation and to achieving an altered state. In the sacred geometry of the cathedral the labyrinth is mirrored by another mandala, the great rose window.
The stained glass of the Middle Ages appeared first in Iran/Iraq in the eleventh century. The extraordinary, luminescent glass of Chartres was manufactured by medieval alchemical adepts who had learned the secrets of the Arabs and whose techniques we cannot now reproduce. Schwaller de Lubicz, the great Egyptologist, explained to his biographer André Vanden Broeck that the brilliant reds and blues of the stained glass at Chartres used no chemical pigmentation but a separation of the volatile spirit of metals that he tested with the famous alchemist Fulcanelli and also found in shards of glass he unearthed in Egypt.
The rose window, which in its outer circle displays the signs of the zodiac, represents the chakra ablaze as it should be when we reach the centre of life’s labyrinth, dancing finally to the Music of the Spheres. Not for nothing has Chartres Cathedral been described as an alchemical crucible for the transformation of humanity.
Islam was weaving its way into the fabric of the whole world both esoterically and exoterically. Then, in 1076, Turkish Muslims took control of Jerusalem.
18. THE WISE DEMON OF THE TEMPLARS
The Prophecies of Joachim • The Loves of Ramón Lull • St Francis and the Buddha • Roger Bacon Mocks Thomas Aquinas • The Templars Worship Baphomet
IN 1076 TURKISH MUSLIMS TOOK control of Jerusalem and began to persecute Christian pilgrims. The Crusaders freed Jerusalem, then lost it again.
In 1119 five knights met under the leadership of Hugo de Payens at the place of the Crucifixion. Like the knights who had ridden in the quest for the Grail, they vowed to make themselves worthy vessels to carry the blood of Christ. In order to protect pilgrims, they set up their headquarters in what was believed to have been the site of the stables attached to the Temple of Solomon.
Founded between the first and second Crusade, they became Christianity’s crack troops. The Knights Templar or the Order of the Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to give them their full title, always wore sheepskin breeches beneath their outer clothing as symbol of their chastity, and they were forbidden to cut their beards. They were to own nothing except a sword, holding all property in common. They were never to ask for mercy from the enemy, only retreating if the odds were three to one. And though they might retreat, they would always in the end have to fight to the death.
St Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian monastic order and the most influential churchman of the day, wrote the ‘order’, or rule book, of the Templars in 1128, so that they became, formally, a religious order. Bernard wrote of the Templars that they knew no fear, that ‘one of them has often put to flight a thousand’, that they were gentler than lambs, grimmer than lions, and theirs was ‘the mildness of monks and the valour of knights’.
The archaeological evidence seems to confirm that the Templars may have had an ulterior motive for their order — to excavate the site of the Temple. Templar artefacts have been discovered in tunnels deep below it. These tunnels have been cut out of solid rock in a direction that would have taken them directly under the supposed site of the Holy of Holies.
The initiation ceremonies of the Templars clearly brought together different traditions, including Sufism and the Solomonic wisdom of the Temple. A lamb was killed and from its body a cord was made and placed around the candidate’s neck. He was led into the initiation chamber by this cord. He had been made to swear that his intentions were completely pure, on pain of death, and now the candidate wondered if the Grand Master could see into his soul by occult means — was he about to die?
Candidates endured frightening ordeals of the type that candidates for initiation by Zarathustra had had to undergo, involving confrontations with dreadful demonic forces, so that they would be prepared to face death or any horrors they might encounter in their later lives.
These confrontations with demons in initiation would come back to haunt the Templars, but for about two hundred years their esprit de corp
s and tight organizational structure made them extraordinarily successful in influencing, if not directing, world affairs.
Because many nobles joined the order, giving over rights to their property, the Templars became extremely rich. They invented letters of credit so that money could be transferred without risk of being stolen by robbers. Their Temple in Paris became the centre of French finances. They were in some ways the forerunners of banks, instrumental in preparing for the rise of the merchant classes. The Templars were also patrons of the first trade guilds to be independent of Church and nobility. Called the Compagnons du Devoir, these guilds were responsible for the Templars’ building projects, maintained ethical codes and protected members’ widows and orphans.
AT THE END OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY other challenges to the supremacy of the Church were arising.
In 1190-91 Richard the Lionheart, grandson of Guillaume of Poitiers, the first Troubador, was returning from the third Crusade. He stopped off to visit a mountain hermit, who was becoming famous for his gift of prophecy. The report came back with Richard: ‘What black tidings lie beneath that cowl!’
Born in a small village in Calabria in about 1135, Joachim had lived as a hermit for many years before joining an abbey and eventually founding his own Abbey of Fiore in the mountains.
He was trying to understand the Revelations of St John, wrestling with it, as he put it — and being defeated. Then one Easter morning he awoke a new man, having been granted a new faculty of understanding. The prophetic commentaries that then poured out of him would influence spiritual thought and mystical groups throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, and then later the Rosicrucians.
There is a cabalistic dimension to Joachim’s writings even though the central books of the Cabala had yet to be published, perhaps the result of his friendship with Petrus Alphonsi, a Spanish Jewish convert. Of course, the Old Testament itself has a strong sense of God working through history, but what is specifically cabalistic about Joachim’s thought is his interpretation of biblical texts in terms of complex number symbolism and his vision of what he called the Tree of Life. He published a diagram of this tree two hundred years before a similar idea was published by Cabalists, most likely drawing on oral tradition he encountered through his friendship with Alphonsi.
But the aspect of Joachim’s teaching that really grabbed the medieval imagination was his theory of three. He argued that if the Old Testament was the Age of the Father, which had called for fear and obedience, and if the New Testament was the Age of the Son, the age of the Church and of faith, then the reality of the Trinity suggests that a third age is coming, an age of the Holy Spirit. Then the Church will no longer be necessary, because this will be an age of freedom and love. Because Joachim was an initiate there was also an astrological dimension to his thought, usually glossed over by Church commentators. The Age of Aries was the Age of the Father, Pisces the Age of the Son, and Aquarius the Age of the Holy Spirit.
Joachim prophesied that there would be a time of transition from the second to the third age, when a new order of spiritual men would educate humanity, when Elijah would reappear, as prophesied in the last verse of the Old Testament in the Book of Malachi. Elijah would be the forerunner of the Messiah, arriving to usher in the great inovatio. Joachim also prophesied the Anti-Christ will incarnate before the third age began. As we shall see, Joachim’s prophecies still fascinate the secret societies today.
RAMÓN LULL, DOCTOR ILLUMINATUS, was a missionary to the Muslims whose thought was nevertheless saturated with Islamic ideas.
Ramón Lull was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, in 1235 and brought up as a page in the royal court. He led a carefree life of pleasure. One day, lusting after a Genoese lady and wanting her badly, he rode his horse into the church of Eulalia where she was praying. She turned him away, but one day she responded to verses he had sent her by summoning him to a tryst. When he arrived, without warning she exposed her breast to him — it was being eaten away by a malignant disease.
This shock marked the beginning of the process of Lull’s conversion. It helped form his view of the world as a place of oscillating extremes, where appearance might well mask their opposites. In his most famous book, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, he asks, ‘When comes the hour in which water that flows downwards shall change its nature and mount upwards?’ He talks of the Lover falling among thorns, but how they seemed to him like flowers and a bed of love. ‘What is misery?’ he asks. ‘To get one’s desires in this world… If you see a Lover clothed in fine raiment’, he says, ‘sated with food and sleep, know that in that man thou seeest damnation and torment.’ The scent of flowers brings to the Lover’s mind the evil stench of riches and meanness, of old age and lasciviousness, of discontent and pride.
Astrology re-introduced into Europe via Islam, personified here in a sixteenth-century French manuscript.
Lull wrote of mounting the ladder of humanity to glory in the Divine Nature. This mystical ascent is achieved by working on what he calls the powers of the soul — feeling, imagination, understanding and will. In this way he was helping to forge the deeply personal form of alchemy that, as we will see, would be the great engine of esoteric Europe.
In one of his harsher sayings he said: ‘If thou speaketh truth, O fool, thou wilt be beaten by men tormented, reproved and killed’. While preaching to the Muslims in North Africa he was set upon by a crowd, led out of the city and stoned to death.
FRANCIS WAS BORN INTO A WORLD WHERE serfs suffered extreme poverty and where the deformed, the aged, the destitute and lepers were treated with utter contempt. The wealthy clergy made a good living out of the serfs and persecuted anyone who disagreed with them.
In 1206 Francis was a rich young man in his twenties in Assisi in Italy. He was leading a carefree and heartless life, avoiding all contact with hardship, holding his nose if he saw a leper.
It is impossible not to see the parallels with the life of Prince Siddartha.
Then one day he was out riding when his horse suddenly reared up and he found himself looking down at a leper. He dismounted and before he knew it was grasping the leper’s bloody hand, and kissing the supurating cheeks and lips. He felt the leper withdraw his hand, and when Francis looked up he saw the leper had vanished.
He knew then that, like St Paul on the road to Damascus, he had had an encounter with the risen Christ.
Francis’s life and philosophy were turned upside down and inside out. He began to see with all clarity that the Gospels recommended a life of poverty, devoted to helping others, possessing ‘neither gold nor silver nor money in your purse, no wallet for your journey, nor two coats, nor shoes’. Poverty, he was to say, is to have nothing, to wish for nothing, yet to possess all things truly in the spirit of freedom. He came to see that experience itself, not things experienced, were important. The things we possess have a hold on us and threaten to rule our lives. A voice emanating from a painted crucifix in the Church of San Domenico near Assisi told him, ‘Go, Francis, and repair my House, which as you can see, is falling into ruin.’ Francis felt that this experience was ineffable.
He so transformed his nature in the animal, vegetable and, as we shall see shortly, in the material dimensions, that animals responded to him in an amazing way. A cricket sang when he asked. Birds gathered to hear him preach. When a large, fierce wolf terrorized the mountain town of Gubbio, Francis went out to meet it. The wolf ran towards Francis, but when he ordered it not to hurt anyone, the wolf lay down at his feet. It then began to walk alongside him, completely tamed. A few years ago a wolf ’s skeleton was found buried underneath the floor of the Church of San Francesco della Pace in Gubbio.
If we compare the mysticism of Ramón Lull with that of St Francis we see that a profound change has taken place in a very short time. Francis’s mysticism is the mysticism of simple, natural things, of the open air and the everyday.
In the first biography of St Francis, The Little Flowers of St Francis, it is said of him that he dis
covered the hidden things of nature with his sensitive heart. To Francis all things were alive. His was an ecstatic vision of the cosmos as idealism conceives it, everything created and charged with life by the celestial hierarchies. All creation sings in unison in the Canticle of Brother Sun and Sister Moon:
All praise be yours, my Lord, through all you have made
And first my lord Brother Sun
Who brings the day.
All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars
In the heavens you have made them
Bright and precious and fair.
The spirit of Christianity had once helped the evolution of Buddhism. It had introduced a spirit of enthusiasm that helped the Buddha’s teaching of universal compassion find fulfilment in the material world. Now, although the Buddha did not incarnate again, his spirit here helped reform Christianity by inspiring a simple devotion and compassion for all living things.
Near the end of his life Francis was meditating on Mount La Verna, praying outside his hermit’s cell, when suddenly the whole sky blazed with light, and a six-winged Seraph appeared to him. Francis realized that this great being had the very same face he had seen on the painted crucifix that had set him out on his mission. He understood that Jesus Christ was sending him on a new mission.
Shortly after the death of St Francis trouble broke out in the order he had founded, the Franciscans. The Pope asked the order to take on extra responsibilities involving owning property and handling money. Many of the brothers saw this as a violation of St Francis’s vision, and they formed breakaway groups called the Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli. Both to themselves and to many outsiders they seemed like the new order of spiritual men whom Joachim had prophesied would oversee the end of the Church.
