First Templar Nation

by Freddy Silva

  This is powerful stuff, hence why the secrets of the Mysteries schools were well guarded and typically transmitted orally from generation to generation by wisdom keepers or priests of the highest moral integrity.

  The Graal quest has always been associated with a close-knit group of savants privy to special knowledge who embark on a mission to find truth, enlightenment, and right action against injustice. The tales are packaged for the audience of the period, for example, Jason and the Argonauts, Arthur and the twelve knights, or Robin Hood and his merry men (the green-attired Robin representing the rejuvenating-resurrected nature gods Osiris, Pan, and the Green Man). During the years they spent digging under Temple Mount, if the Templars did rediscover Essene texts outlining the rites of living resurrection, then it is a simple logical leap to deduce this as the reason why everyone fell over themselves to hand over property and soul to the Templars, for it was they who could provide the keys to the kingdom of heaven, not the Catholic Church.

  Personal salvation without a corrupt intermediary? Sheer paradise! As it happens, Templar resurrection ceremonies did come to light during questioning by the Inquisition in France, in which informants revealed ceremonies involving initiates being resurrected from a ritual grave.

  Could this then be the central concept behind the Graal?

  The Graal story appears in Europe in AD 717 as Le Seynt Graal via a hermit named Waleran following a vision of Jesus, who hands him a book and states, cryptically, “Here is the Book of thy Descent. Here begins the Book of the Sangréal.” Nothing else is heard of it until 1128—a momentous year for the Templars—when the story resurfaces in the small town of Oxford, England.

  Upon being awarded the title of Templar Master of England, Payen de Mont-Didier (one of the original Templars) bid Hugues de Payns adieu in London and set out on an impressive nationwide construction project, starting with a Templar preceptory in Oxford on land provided by Princess Matilda, wife to the grandson of Baudoin II, son of Count Fulk d’Anjou, who was himself an early financier of the Templars and later became a Templar knight and king of Jerusalem.

  While in Oxford, Payen de Mont-Didier confided the story of the Templars and their purpose to a secular canon named Geoffrey of Monmouth, who published the account eight years later in a story titled A Matter of Britain, in which a kind of obscure messianic savior-king named Arthur Pendragon is carried westward to a magical land where his body is to rest until such time as he is resuscitated and the Light once again prevails across the kingdom. Geoffrey was adamant throughout his life that the events portrayed in the story were based on very ancient documents he’d been privy to in Oxford, yet was careful never to divulge their origin or whereabouts.18

  Although Geoffrey’s story stops short of introducing the Grail, a contemporary historian named William of Malmsbury did include it in his later version. William would not have been ignorant of Payen de Mont-Didier either, for the abbey in which he resided was but a half hour’s horse ride from the Templar’s other preceptory at Temple Guiting. And William, being a librarian, Preceptor, and chronicler of the church, would hardly have passed on the opportunity to meet this Flemish man engaged in a most unusual church-building program.19

  After this the Graal reappears in France, in the work of the French poet and troubadour Chrétien de Troyes,20 whose sponsor, Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen consort of France, donated the strategic port of La Rochelle to the Templars.21 In 1160 her daughter, the comtesse Marie de Champagne, also became Chrétien’s patroness, and he subsequently joined her court at Troyes. There, nestled in the heart of Templar and Cistercian territory, Chrétien wrote Le Conte del Graal: Roman de Perceval, in which a long and seemingly futile quest for a supreme object is carefully veiled in a veneer of acceptable Christian imagery so as to ward off charges of heresy by the church. It is an allegorical tale describing a pathway to spiritual transfiguration via an initiatory process in which the hero achieves an alchemical transmutation into “gold.” At its most simplistic, the story’s central character is a kind of hermit who leaves the woods to become a knight, trains with a spiritual mentor, then goes on a long quest and suitably returns with his eyes open, whereupon he meets a beautiful maiden and the two are wed. In other words, the hero is awakened to the greater mystery of life and walks a path to self-enlightenment.

  And thus a “dead man” rises.

  A significant moment occurs in Chrétien’s story when the hero, Perceval, is witness to a procession in which a young woman carries the Graal on an elaborately decorated salver, and yet nowhere is there any mention of a cup, a chalice, or any association with a royal bloodline—in fact the attention is on that tray, and it is to this tray we shall return later.

  What is riveting about Chrétien’s allegorical work is that in reading between the lines one sees echoes of the lives of the personalities involved with the Templars as well as the various hermits and monks who played supporting roles, not to mention the central figures and events in the creation of Portugal. It is as though the author is transmitting an important historical yet deeply veiled account of the purpose behind the Sion-Cistercian-Templar alliance. That the story is synonymous with the Templar quest is revealed when Chrétien claimed his work to have been inspired by stories from Philippe d’Alsace, Count of Flanders, whose father was the cousin of the Templar Payen de Mont-Didier!22

  After writing nine thousand lines of text, Chrétien passed away, whereupon the story is continued by a translator named Wauchier de Danain, a name that implies an association with those mystical Celtic people, the Tuadhe d’Anu (or Tuatha Dé Danaan in Ireland), not to mention the predecessors of the Portuguese, the Lusitani.

  A further piece of the Graal story was added in 1190 by an anonymous Templar, possibly one of the many poets encouraged to join the Order.23 In this work titled Perlesvaus, the hero Perceval is received into a castle housing a conclave of initiates who are familiar with the Graal. During a ceremony he meets 33 initiates “clad in white garments, and not one of them but had a red cross in the midst of his breast.”24 This time, emphasis is placed throughout the story on the importance of lineage, but what makes Perlesvaus stand apart is its focus on the initiates’ understanding of alchemy and gnosticism, and how the Graal is intended to be an illuminating transcendental experience whereby one comes to see the world through very different eyes because the initiate symbolically “rises from the dead.”

  The esoteric leanings of the Graal are enlarged yet again in a follow-up by the contemporary Bavarian writer Wolfram von Eschenbach in his story Parzival, thanks to material transmitted to him by a troubadour monk named Guiot de Provence, who had worked as a spokesman for the Templars. Guiot himself may have received his knowledge from any number of Kabalist schools in Europe, from the Iberian city of Toledo, for example, which back then was run by both Arabic and Jewish scholars, or those of Montpellier or Gerona, or most likely the one in the Templar hometown of Troyes, which just happened to materialize around the same time a certain group of monks addressing themselves as the Ordre de Sion passed through town on their way to build a monastery in Orval.

  In the story of Parzival the Templars are charged with protecting a castle, and behind the regular warrior monks there lies a more secretive order, a very spiritual group symbolized by a dove, who are guardians of the Graal. Wolfram describes how this brotherhood is fed by “a stone that fell from the sky.” This purest of stones is said to resurrect a body, revitalize the ill, prolong life, and rebuild vigor and youth in the body. And it is referred to as the Graal.25

  To the rational mind such a description seems ridiculous. Meteorites don’t do such things. But to the esoteric mind, which reads such tales symbolically, this stone is akin to a library of information descended from an intelligent source (symbolized by the sky or heaven or God), much like the stone tablets given to Moses. In other words, this keystone embodies very ancient high wisdom, and properly applied, the knowledge it contains revitalizes and invigorates the individual, who in turn come
s to embody its philosophy, so much so that the keystone becomes the spiritual foundation of the individual, even an entire philosophical movement.

  The keystone is real enough: it is known in Jerusalem as the Rock of Sion and in Mecca as the Ka’Ba, and its tradition became embodied in the esoteric teachings of the Kaballah.

  The imbibing of such wisdom would be liberating beyond belief, it would amount to a personal resurrection, and compared to the life you knew before, of course you would feel as though you had regained your youth. Such a transformation is comparable to an altered state of consciousness; it is Zen, a union with God. And besides being symbolic it is meant to be experienced.

  And an experience of such magnitude would be something worth protecting with your life, it would be worth fighting for and, paradoxically, worth killing for.

  It would seem, then, that the Graal is the embodiment of a protocol of initiation into the mysteries of life, a direct and mystical experience of God—the very credo of the Cistercian Order and its abbot, Bernard de Clairvaux.

  Its roots lie in a Sumerian account from circa 2500 BC in which the gra-al is described as “the nectar of supreme essence” of the cup-bearing goddess Inanna, a queen of heaven akin to Isis, who takes for a bridegroom the initiate Dumuzi (also spelled Tammuz), and it is through this sacred marriage that this shepherd is resurrected as a god-man. Called Song of Inanna, it was the template upon which the Song of Solomon would later be modeled.

  Inanna was a hierodule (sacred woman), a high priestess who presided over the highest and most secret aspect of initiation—epitomized by the union of the initiate with his divine bride—and was responsible for ensuring the initiate recovered from his or her out-of-body experience. Such priestesses were nicknamed “bees” and wore the red robe of ritu (truth), the origin of the word ritual.26

  So in a manner of speaking, the Graal is synonymous with both a bloodline and a spiritual ideal, since it was up to a lineage of priest-kings, pharaohs, and initiates indoctrinated into the Mysteries to carry and transmit its knowledge, with the importance placed on the matriarchal line of women who perpetuated said lineage.

  Like many perennial epics depicting the triumph of good over evil, the guardianship of the Graal asks of the invited to be warrior monks. During the quest, initiates seek to harmonize polar opposites: the needs of the soul and the obvious practicalities of the flesh, and in the twelfth century even monks had to think like soldiers just to survive. The mediation between the head in heaven and feet on the ground is the way in which the hero of the story remains faithful to the maiden he marries. This woman must have possessed exceptional qualities because he protects her at any cost.

  Indeed, she is one radiant beauty, for she is repeatedly referred to as Sophia (wisdom).

  This bride is the embodiment of the divine feminine in nature, knowledge of the very highest degree. She was the beautiful maiden to whom the Graal followers ultimately were wedded, and for whom they would willingly lay down their lives—and most Templars would one day do.

  These principles were embraced by Bernard de Clairvaux. The Templars honored his oath to the divine virgin by following the “Obedience of Bethany, the castle of Mary and Martha” whenever and wherever they consecrated churches to Notre Dame or rededicated former temples to her Egyptian predecessor, Isis, just as Count Dom Henrique did in Braga when he honored the ruined temple of said goddess by erecting a new cathedral on its stones.

  It is quite conceivable that one of the reasons the Templars invested so much effort in creating Europe’s first independent nation-state was to conceal there such a secret, an object or a knowledge of such immense consequence that it required a territory as far away from Rome as possible, “free from all official and ecclesiastical interference.”27 In the original legend, the Graal is described as a gold object carried on a salver, a silver tray used in a formal ceremony. It is very similar to the Portuguese root word salvar (to save), from which arises the term salvation. And salvation through the Graal—this Sophia, this beautiful woman of knowledge—seems to be what the Templar quest was really about. Could this have been sufficient motivation to send a group of warrior monks on a quest from Lorraine, Champagne, and Burgundy to Jerusalem, then to assist in setting up a Portuguese crown on the opposite side of Europe, precisely as Hugues de Payns instructed?

  The creation of a nation-state in twelfth-century Europe must have seemed like a Graal quest to the people involved, the undertaking of a perilous journey to achieve a seemingly impossible task. Even the event that established Portugal as a nation-state—the battle of Ourique—is itself shrouded in myth; the actual location has never been satisfactorily located. It is one of the great ironies of history that the defining moment of Portugal’s history cannot be adequately pinpointed, like Iberia’s own version of Perzival searching for the elusive Graal. The same is true of that other famous Graal knight, King Arthur, for his famous battle site at Mons Badonicus has not been adequately located either,28 and battlefields of such historical import just do not disappear!

  Descriptions of the terrain in the surviving accounts of Ourique suggest the conflict took place not far from the estuary of the mighty river Tejo, and in 1139 that area marked the nebulous frontier with the Moors. Right in the middle stood a village named Casal do Ouro, and exactly 33 miles to the north, the town of Ourém. Both places share the same root word with Ourique—ouro (gold)—and since gold is a metaphor for the Graal, is it possible the defining moment in Portuguese history may have taken place in the fields around Ourém? After all, the precise spelling of words and names in the twelfth century was a pretty nebulous affair in itself.

  Positioned to the south of the castle of Souré, the hilltop village of Ourém was captured from the Moors by Afonso Henriques in 1136, three years before Ourique, but coincidentally on the same day, the feast day of John the Baptist. With territories being won, lost, and regained, and with records of this era being as sparse as they are contradictory, it is possible the two events are one and the same.

  Two things make the idea rather compelling. First, of all the famous towns in his possession, Afonso Henriques granted the charter of this otherwise inconsequential village to a maiden of his own, his daughter Teresa (absolutely not to be confused with his mother). Second, a local legend claims that Ourém owes its name, of all things, to a love story between a Muslim and a Christian. An Arab princess named Fatima was captured by a knight named Gonçalo during the battle for the town, but later fell madly in love with him, converted to Christianity, and changed her name to Oureana, from which the town’s name is derived.

  For a chosen name, it is cunningly appropriate, for ouro-ana literally translates as “gold of ana,” a clear reference to the goddess of the Lusitani as well as their Celtic cousins in central Europe, the Burgundii, the lineage of the king of Portugal.

  Tragically, Fatima died while still a young woman. An understandably inconsolable Gonçalo joined the Cistercian Monastery in nearby Alcobaça as a remedy for his sorrow, and when its abbot built a small priory on a nearby hill, Brother Gonçalo took Fatima’s remains to be interred there.29 A town grew around the priory and over time became of the most Christian of pilgrimage sites, still remembered to this day as Fatima.

  The story is hardly definitive proof that the battle of Ourique was in fact the battle of Ourém, but in reading between the lines of this seeming fairy tale—for the characters and events are real enough—this story representing the reconciliation of opposites, here represented by a Muslim and a Christian, would be in keeping with Cistercian and esoteric principles, the same principles that lie at the heart of the Graal quest, for it is precisely with a reconciliation that the quester finally discovers “gold.”

  The same reconciliation lies at the heart of the relationship between the Templars and enlightened Arabs, and the two worked much more closely than is often advertised. Afonso Henriques himself colluded with Sufi Master Ibn Qasi against the Almoravids who invaded Portugal; even the introduction
of Gothic architecture was merely an extension of the Arab style. There was even mutual respect in their devotion to God, as the following account by a Muslim pilgrim to Jerusalem illustrates:

  When I visited Jerusalem I had the habit of walking to the al-Aqsa mosque, place of residence of my Templar friends. On one side there was a small oratory where the Franks placed a church. The Templars put this at my disposal for my prayer. One day I entered and said, “Allah Akbar,” and as I commenced my prayer a man, a Franj [Crusader], ran up to me and turned me toward the east, and said, “This is how you pray!” Immediately some Templars came to my aid and moved him aside. I continued my prayer and again the man came at me, repeating, “This is how you pray.” Again the Templars intervened and apologized: “He is a stranger, just arrived with the Crusades and never saw anyone pray without facing east.” I replied that I had said my prayers, and left, stupefied by the behavior of that demon who was so aghast to see me pray in the direction of Mecca.30

  Ultimately for Afonso, the Templars, and the Cistercians, the “gold” they nurtured was the birthing of a new nation, for in doing so they raised a kingdom of conscience out of a land long dead from decades of conflict.

  It is worth pointing out two more extraordinary coincidences: one, Eleanor of Aquitaine—sponsor of Graal author Chrétien de Troyes—donated the strategic maritime port of La Rochelle to the Templars at the same time Portugal becomes a nation-state;31 and two, Chrétien joins her daughter’s court in Troyes and sits at his desk to write his Graal opus just as the Templars are laying the cornerstone to a round church in the town of Thamar.

  Perhaps we shall never know how many of these thoughts about the Graal were going through Afonso Henriques’s mind as he watched the ink of his royal seal dry into the vellum of the charter of Ceras. Secret societies love their symbols because, just like a parable, to the casual viewer they convey one message, while to the initiate of the Mysteries they conceal another.