First Templar Nation

by Freddy Silva

  Survey of Temple Mount by the British engineers showing underground digs. 1884.

  Seal of Afonso Henriques. Charter of Ceras.

  36

  1159. COIMBRA. THE KING OF PORTUGAL’S DESK, PART I . . .

  There exists in the Order a law so extraordinary on which such a secret should be kept, that any knight would prefer his head cut off rather than reveal it to anyone,” revealed Gervais de Beauvais, a Templar Preceptor in France, during his interrogation by the Holy Inquisition.

  The Order kept a book of statutes, much like a set of guidelines, but there also existed a secret book that could not be revealed beyond the inner brotherhood of trustees, along with an item in the general chapter of the Order that should anyone else read it, even if the king of France, the members would kill them.1

  37

  1159. COIMBRA. THE KING OF PORTUGAL’S DESK, PART II . . .

  The Iberian word for horse is caballo, and in Portuguese, cavalo. From cavalo comes cavar, “to dig below the surface,” precisely what one must do to understand the secret knowledge contained in esoteric teachings such as the Ka-Ba-Allah (spirit-body of God).

  Every gnostic sect and secret society has promulgated its knowledge through the cunning use of allegory, metaphor, and symbol. In a world of corrupt clergymen and kings, it has proven to be the safest method of transmitting important concepts and for initiates to exchange signals with one another. In this respect the Templars were no different; they even developed a complex cipher in Latin.1 In their monuments, seals, and talismans, a symbolic language lies encoded. It is a timeless language, and as such, it cannot be scoured by time. But to anyone immersed in the Mysteries it can be as easy to unravel as a nursery rhyme.

  The most famous of Templar talismans is the symbol with which they are so readily identified: the two knights riding a horse. In mythology the horse is synonymous with knowledge, specifically sacred knowledge. Even in scripture, when God wishes to disclose information to humanity, It typically dispatches an archangel mounted on a horse.

  The horse’s counterpart in the Middle East is the sphinx, and legends claim it sits protecting a hall of records, the repository of all knowledge. So when two Templar knights ride the one horse they personify not just the two levels of initiate within the Order, they also represent the complementary forces of light and dark, and it is the balance between the two that steers the knowledge on its intended and correct course.

  The word talisman comes from the Arabic tilsam and means “complete religious rite,” denoting an object or symbol that is imbued with magical properties. In order to understand the power of such magic it is important to first understand how the magic taught in esoteric schools is a science the cynical mind finds hard to accept because its roots have been corrupted through Victorian parlor trickery, the might of religion, the zealots of science, and of course, that Lucifer of the modern world, popular television. But it was not always so. Even in the seventeenth century, magic was administered every day in the form of medicine. Many accounts survive of notable figureheads being given amulets or prescribed remedies during illness or plague that today seem unpalatable. A ring given to Queen Elizabeth I by her physician to protect her from the plague, or the three spiders worn by Elias Ashmole to counteract the ague, or the hare foot worn by Samuel Pepys as a cure for colic all demonstrate how there was no distinction between natural remedies and symbolic magic. Yet when such remedies are analyzed from a chemist’s point of view they reveal how natural elements in what appear to be unusual potions contain ingredients that prevent the types of illness for which the “remedies” were prescribed. Thus, “magic” was no more than a thorough understanding and application of natural laws.2

  When enlightened kings and queens wished for their word or law to carry special favor they often would sprinkle herbs on the page prior to signing their names.3 The herb may or may not have carried power in itself, but its properties would correspond with the intention of the message. In other words, the properties of the herb would help the monarch focus and amplify his or her intent on the written page.

  Likewise, an accompanying seal would be designed using a specific geometry or cryptogram that was emblematic of the ruler’s message or will.

  This belief in the effective utility of any object, remedy, or geometry stemmed from ancient systems of observation and classification that noted the existence of correspondences and analogies occurring in all cycles of the natural world. Before industry and cold, hard logic separated human common sense from its god-given intuitive abilities, people observed and experienced life directly. Aboriginal cultures can still walk a barren desert by seeing or feeling the Earth’s telluric currents and travel along them to reach an intended destination.4 When one possesses such a degree of connection with his or her environment, it is possible to readily discern nature on a very subtle level, it is possible to deduce correspondences and interactions taking place all around. And armed with millennia of experience handed down orally or through tradition and teaching, it is possible to overcome problems on a physical level through the application of an alchemy based on natural forces.

  This is magic. Only when a society loses the underlying understanding of a concept does one person’s science and magic become another’s ridicule and superstition.5

  An important talisman for the Knights Templar was the octagon, the geometric blueprint behind their logo, their churches, and their temples.

  For King Afonso Henriques it was also the design of the royal seal he was about to place on the charter of Ceras, for it would invest in Gualdino Paes the power to erect the mother church of the Templars, rebuild the town of Thamara, and consecrate an unusual round church above it.

  38

  1159. COIMBRA. THE KING OF PORTUGAL’S DESK, PART III . . .

  The Grail is variously described as a womb, a chalice, a bowl, a cauldron, a repository, a woman, a bloodline, an altar, an ark—and a salver, a tray made from a precious metal.

  The Grail appears in medieval French literature as Graal and Sangraal, or sang real, and literally means “royal blood,” referring to a bloodline of divine kingship. This bloodline is associated with a lineage of Merovingian priest-kings whose heritage stems from the female line of the Sicambrians circa 380 BC, but whose history extends further back in time to King David of Judah and his son Solomon, under whose direction an impressive temple was built on Temple Mount and inside whose Holy of Holies rested a wooden box said to contain the sum knowledge of God. The trail continues deeper into history with the Trojan royal family and the city of Troy, and before them, the priest-kings of Sumeria who followed the initiation tradition of the divine marriage and carried the title Sanga-lugal.

  Solomon’s kingly practices became the revered model for successive Merovingian monarchs just as his temple became the focus of attention for the Knights Templar—as did the Portuguese city of Braga, founded by Teukros, legendary archer of Greek and Trojan royal lineage. Which begs the question: Were the Templars pursuing this bloodline when they decided on Braga as their base?

  The Merovingian tradition was not unlike that of the Druids, the Mandeans, or the brotherhood of ascetics living on Mount Sion, the Essenes. In their time the Merovingians were known as Newmage (New Covenant), ironically the same name adopted by the Essenes.1 One of the Merovingians’ primary concerns was the promulgation of secret esoteric knowledge, while their descendents—people such as Godefroi de Bouillon, Baudoin I, and ostensibly, Afonso Henriques—were committed to vows of obligation.

  This royal bloodline includes Jesus and his consort, Mary Magdalene,*302 whose union brought forth a daughter named Tamar.3 This union was common knowledge throughout the Near East, even to gnostic Christians, but it was considered a huge threat to a new religion whose popes had come to anoint themselves as God’s sole representatives on Earth. To preserve such a monopoly the Catholic Church made every attempt to deny the Davidic lineage, and for this reason, above all others, it exterminated hundreds of thousands�
�probably millions—in its effort to erase every trace of evidence that could destabilize its bogus claim to rule by hallowed appointment. It deemphasized Mary Magdalene’s role as the continuation of the lineage by demonizing her as a slut, then subsequently suffocated the power of the feminine by demonizing women in general.

  Bernard de Clairvaux, on the other hand, specified the importance of Mary Magdalene in the grand scheme of things, for in drafting the Latin Rule at the Council of Troyes he specifically stated how the knights should follow “the Obedience of Bethany, the castle of Mary and Martha,” in other words, obedience to Mary of Bethany, known even to the medieval church as the Magdalene.4 The knights would honor this oath by, among many acts, dedicating their cathedrals and countless churches to the divine virgin, Notre Dame, otherwise known as the Magdalene,5 while further amplifying the connection by locating the buildings on the sites of temples formerly dedicated to the original divine virgin, Isis, such as the cathedral of Braga. Even notable events in Templar history were conducted on her feast day, July 22.

  The divine virgin, Isis, with the infant Horus.

  The talismans of the Merovingians were the bee and the honeycomb, primarily because they so effortlessly characterize the manifestation of divine harmony in nature. The same is true of their priest-king predecessors, the Egyptian pharaohs, as well as priestesses honoring the cults of fertility, such as Ceres and Demeter, who were nicknamed bees.6 As such, the construction of the honeycomb was associated with personal insight and wisdom, a concept immortalized in the Bible: “Jonathan . . . put forth the end of the rod that was in his hand, and dipped it in a honey comb, and put his hand to his mouth; and his eyes were enlightened.”7 And again, this time in the Book of Proverbs: “My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste: So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall not be cut off.”8 Such talismans were later adopted by Bernard de Clairvaux, leading to speculation that, through his noble Burgundian parentage, he too descended from this bloodline.

  The return of sang real is heralded as the restoration of fertility to a land that has become barren. It is the restoration of a divine order to territories reduced to rubble from protracted war, in other words, the resurgence of wisdom over barbarity. Whether such stories are interpreted literally or allegorically, the notion that the Templars, together with the Ordre de Sion, were engaged in a coup d’état against Rome to reestablish this spiritual bloodline is a plausible and tempting inquiry, especially since the “price of admission” into the Knights Templar was thirty pieces of silver, the sum for which the ministry of the Essenes/ Nasoreans and their priests Jesus and John the Baptist were betrayed. It was a declaration, an inside joke, even, by the Order of the Temple of its aim to right an injustice that shut down a succession of rightful spiritual descendents and with it the negation of its most important initiation ritual, the “raising of the dead.”

  Bloodline is a recurring theme throughout the Templar story, as it is in the Ordre de Sion’s, whose stated purpose was to reestablish the Merovingian bloodline in Jerusalem,9 which it apparently did thanks to a fruitful relationship established by some of the Ordre’s members—Peter the Hermit, in particular—with Godefroi de Bouillon, whom they subsequently placed on the throne of Jerusalem.

  Given the prevalent intermarrying between the adjacent houses of Burgundy, Flanders, and Champagne, Godefroi would not have been the only offspring carrying sacred DNA. There would have been others; he was merely the most eligible and direct descendent of the Davidic bloodline.10 Given the Burgundian lineage of the first king of Portugal and how he gained his throne due to the interrelationship between the Templars, the Cistercians, and the Ordre de Sion, it is tempting to consider that the Ordre de Sion may have quietly placed a second Merovingian on the throne, this time on the opposite flank of Europe. Certainly there are hints of this:

  The Ordre’s central figure, Prior Arnaldo da Rocha, worked closely with Count Dom Henrique and the Portugale court to ensure the implementation of an independent nation-state following the count’s untimely death, with his son as king.

  Afonso Henriques’s family tree descended from the royal line of Frankish kings and includes Henri I and Hugo Capet.

  The king was nephew to both Bernard de Clairvaux and Duke Odo I of Burgundy, two alleged Merovingians.

  Like Godefroi de Bouillon, Afonso ascended to kingship indirectly—not as a direct son of a king, but of a count descended from a royal line.

  The proclamation of his kingship on the battlefield of Ourique coincides with the day Godefroi de Bouillon was himself offered the crown of Jerusalem.

  Realistically, all this is circumstantial. Considerable obstacles stand in the way of definitive proof, since the Templars hid much of their written records during the organized persecution of the Order in 1307. What few records remained in Portugal were cleansed by the Inquisition and during the ominous period of reforms in the sixteenth century by the Jesuit priest Antonio de Lisboa,11 who also vandalized all twenty-nine graves of the Templar Masters and knights buried in the mother church at Olival before scattering their remains. Brother Bernardo da Costa, chronicler of the Templar Order in Portugal, describes how numerous documents written prior to the reformation of the Templars vanished at this time, including the Order’s famous diary. Lastly, a sizeable portion of the remaining Templar archive was lost when the National Archive in Lisbon burned down following a catastrophic earthquake in 1755.12

  The idea of a sacred bloodline installed in Portugal would remain purely speculative were it not for a hint of a smoking gun. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries the monastery of Alcobaça amassed a large codex collection in its library. One surviving document held in the Cistercian archives outlines the rites of succession of Templar Masters in Portugal, in which the swearing of allegiance by every new Master unambiguously declares obedience to the Order of Cister and a vow “to protect the bloodline of David.”13 Such a blatant line item would hardly be featured in the rite unless there was a bloodline to protect!

  But there is another equally compelling angle to the interpretation of the Graal and it may help explain why the Knights Templar, the Cistercians, and the Ordre de Sion formed a complex pattern of allegiances that gave life to the kingdom of Portugal.

  It is said that as a sacred vessel the Graal has the power to restore life to the dead. But since restoring a decayed organism back to life is a perversion of the laws of nature (not to mention olfactorily repugnant), it is very likely the phrase was intended symbolically. Every esoteric, hermetic, and gnostic society that ever existed always veiled its most important tenets in allegories and metaphors as a means to conceal important information from abuse or to protect its writers from torture, imprisonment, and certain death. Thus, to the casual reader, a myth or legend is accepted at face value, but to an initiate of the Mysteries, it reveals a deeper layer of information. Much like writing a message with lemon juice so that the ordinary eye sees nothing more than a blank piece of paper. Initiates of the Mysteries are a dab hand at masking material from the profane; Jesus himself was particularly good at it, as he once reminded the apostles, “To you was given the Mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven. But others only see them through parables, so that when looking they do not see and hearing they do not understand.”14

  One such parable concerns the “raising of the dead,” an initiatory process as old as Egyptian pharaohs. The metaphor describes how the ordinary person walks through life as though asleep or unconscious (dead), but through initiation into the Mysteries and years of guided instruction (when they “drink from the cup of everlasting life”) they become enlightened. Or to put it another way, they are “raised from the dead.” Such practices were considered crucial to self-empowerment, so much so that the knowledge was withheld from the uninitiated lest it be abused by despots or ecclesiasts seeking control of an individual’s direct experience of God
. Adepts would rather die than reveal the secrets of the Mysteries. And many did, among them John the Baptist, who was deeply involved with the initiatory practices of the Essenes/Nazoreans.15

  The Mysteries were essential components of esoteric sects who practiced and preached gnosis. Gnosis is Greek for knowledge, specifically “knowledge of spiritual mysteries.” It is a knowing that comes not just from ancient teachings but also from a wider perception, much like the Buddhist who finds an expanded awareness from contemplating inner realms. The views held by these sects, including Christian gnostics, differed from those of fundamentalists in that they did not interpret the resurrection literally. They recognized the human condition for what it is, a spiritual death. For them, resurrection is the moment one discovers enlightenment, and the gnostic Gospel of Philip makes this distinction very clear: “Those who say they will die first and then rise are in error, they must receive the resurrection while they live.” Gnostic Christians went so far as to call the literal view of Jesus’s death “the faith of fools,” and anyone believing this was confusing a spiritual truth with an actual event.*3116

  Philosophers such as Cicero, Plato, Pythagoras, and Voltaire unanimously claimed that immersion into the Mysteries provided the only bulwark against humanity falling into a state of depravity and brutality, and earlier Egyptian gnostics felt much the same way. For them, there was no such thing as formal religion, only heka, the nearest English equivalent being “magical power.”17 Derived from heka is the Hebrew hekhal (temple or sanctuary), its most energetic part being the Holy of Holies, equivalent to the altar, considered by virtually every culture as the dwelling place of a god. In other words, it is a space representing the closest possible simulation of the creative force here in the material world.