by Freddy Silva
One of the ringleaders of this heresy—the original meaning of heretic being “someone in possession of facts who is able to choose”—was Hugues de Payns, which the pope soon confirmed:
The Johannites ascribed to Saint John [the Baptist] the foundation of their Secret Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of their Sect assumed the title of Christos, Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers. He, who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the Temple, claimed these imaginary prerogatives, was named Theoclet; he knew Hugues de Payns, he installed him into the Mysteries . . . and finally designated him as his successor. 2
It was also alleged that the Grand Masters of the Ordre de Sion were secret Johannites.3
That this should have raised the ire of the Catholic Church is explained by the fact the Knights Templar, as well as any number of gnostic sects around the time of John the Baptist, were following the gnostic Gospel of John rather than the church’s canon, which confers power unto Jesus as a messiah and a god. It seems everyone except the Catholics were following a truer version of Christianity. This would explain why initiates into the Templar Order were requested to stomp and spit on the cross.*35 “Set not much faith in this,” they were told, “for it is too young.”4 For them, the cross was a symbol of torture, an emblem of a fake religious institution that promulgated one of the greatest lies ever told. Even the debauched Pope Leo X admitted as much in what must rank as one of the biggest gaffes in history: “All ages can testifie enough how profitable that fable of Christ hath ben to us and our companie.”5
The authority of the Catholic Church was further undermined by the gnostic Apocalypse of Peter, another of a set of hidden scrolls discovered in a cave, this time by the Nile: “Those who name themselves bishop and deacon and act as if they had received their authority from God are in reality waterless canals. Although they do not understand the mystery they boast that the mystery of truth belongs to them alone. They have misinterpreted the apostle’s teaching and have set up an imitation church in place of the true Christian brotherhood.”6 Even the notorious Catholic theologian Iraneus was well aware of the power of the gnostic sects: “No one can be compared with them in the greatness of their gnosis, not even if you mention Peter or Paul or any of the disciples.”7
The Templars’ allegiance to John the Baptist rather than the ministry of Jesus needs little convincing. One of the rare pieces of information extracted from the knights under torture was their alleged worship of a devil called Baphomet. They also were charged with practicing the cult of the head, and indeed a bearded, silver-plated head was one of the items confiscated by the Holy Inquisition from the Templar preceptory in Paris.8 As sinister as this might seem, baphomet is merely a corruption of the Arabic abufihamet,*36 meaning “father of wisdom,” which in its native Arabic tongue is also taken to mean “source.” And when decoded using the cipher discovered in the Essene scrolls, the word simply transliterates as sophis (wisdom).
This relic, the only one of special significance to the Templars, was purported to have been the mummified head of John the Baptist, the priest-messiah who baptized initiates into the Mysteries and the living resurrection that followed.
The cult of the head is an ancient practice predating Druidism. It is nothing more baleful than the veneration of the fertility principle in nature once identified with the god Pan—whom the church overturned into Satan—and the Green Man, whose image as a carved head sprouting a healthy bout of vegetation from its mouth can be found in churches in England more often than statues of Jesus.9
Since the skull was believed to contain the seat of the soul, it was common practice for a deceased leader to have his head preserved or buried in a place of spiritual significance. Because all sacred sites are founded at locations where the Earth’s telluric pathways converge, the power in the severed head permeated the sacred site and flowed along the invisible conduits throughout the land, protecting people and life. The cult of the head is a staple of Celtic mythology, as it is in the Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, even the life of Saint Denis, who is said to have carried his own decapitated noggin two miles to the location in Paris where the Templars built one of the first Gothic cathedrals.
One of the earliest and most notable legends involving this ritual occurred in London—a city founded by the Trojans10—where the head of King Bran the Blessed was interred in the sacred mound that later became the seat of the White Tower. As long as the head remained interred the kingdom was protected, but when successive leaders finally removed it, England’s fortunes began to wane.
There are a number of similarities between Bran the Blessed and the Graal legend. The keeper of the Graal is mortally wounded in the leg (Bran’s wound was in the foot); both are associated with a mystical castle; Bran possessed a magic cauldron that restored the dead back to life; and just like the Templars on Temple Mount, the small band of warriors protecting Bran’s head stayed together for seven years before departing to a far-off place where they live for a further eighty, impervious to the passing of time as though by magic.
Perhaps the most iconic of decapitated people is John the Baptist, regarded by the Essenes and similar gnostic sects as a priest-messiah. John was one of two expected messiahs, the other being the king messiah, Jesus, yet all authority was deferred to John.11 He was said to have lived simply on a diet of locusts and wild honey, a characteristic no doubt applauded by the Cistercians. He lived in the settlement of Bethany; the place where he performed baptisms was marked by a sacred mound where four springs intersected, thereby reflecting Bethany’s other name, Bethabara (house of the crossing).
Bethany, of course, was also the domicile of Mary Magdalene, and the epithets by which the gnostics describe her—“the woman who knew the All” and “the one who is the inheritor of the Light”—clearly identify her as having been indoctrinated into the Mysteries too.12 So when Bernard de Clairvaux wrote that the Templars should vow allegiance to “Bethany, the castle of Mary and Martha,” it was an allegiance to both Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha, and the priestly line of their mentor, John the Baptist. This is what the cryptologist Lambert de Saint-Omer was conveying in his illustration of The Heavenly Jerusalem, which credits the founder of this kingdom of conscience to be John the Baptist, and not, as the world has been led to believe, Jesus.13
All this is very familiar to one particular group of John the Baptist’s followers called the Mughtasilah (Those Who Wash Themselves), or as the sect is known today, the Mandeans. The name originates from the root word manda (secret knowledge). Often called the Christians of Saint John, the Mandaeans trace their origins to Palestine, but within forty years of the decapitation of John they were persecuted, so they moved north to Harran, a center of gnosticism usually associated with another sect called the Sabeans, who emerged from southern Arabia and Ethiopia.
Mandean gnosis is characterized by nine features, all of which echo Templar-Cistercian beliefs. For example:
The soul is in exile while inhabiting the physical body.
Savior spirits assist the soul’s journey through life and afterward return it to the Light.
The use of a language of symbol and metaphor.
The practice of Mysteries to assist and purify the soul, ensuring its rebirth into a spiritual body.
The maintaining of a culture of absolute secrecy with regard to disclosure of the Mysteries so that only those able to understand the truths, and ethical enough to promulgate them, are allowed admission into an inner brotherhood.14
According to the Mandean’s credo, God is a formless entity known as the King of Light or the Great Mana (magic).15 To this day, they maintain that John was the true prophet16 and new Christianity, even rabbinical Judaism are false religions that impede the soul’s release from bondage. And no wonder they believe this: they claim to have been in possession of a collection of original sacred books called the Ginza (Treasure), writ
ten in Aramaic, the language used at the time of John the Baptist. Among these was the Book of John (also known as the Book of Kings), which contains a legendary account of the Baptist’s original message, the one censored by the church.17
In the course of their activities in the Near East the Templars undoubtedly established contact with such Johannite sects because the brotherhood’s beliefs so mirror those of the Mandeans and the Essenes. It is feasible that the Templar’s mandate consisted of nothing more than revitalizing the ministry of John the Baptist and the ancient system of philosophy he so clearly personified. This would explain why Templars who fell under the hammer of the Inquisition admitted that their Order was protecting a great secret, and if this secret included evidence of a surviving holy bloodline, not to mention a tradition of gospels preceding and contradicting the official canon (which they do), the Catholic Church would be outed as an impostor. Such a secret would indeed precipitate a profound change in society.
This alone does not explain a doctrine that allowed initiates “to come in to the joys of Paradise” nor why people so readily made huge donations to the Order. The wording by candidates joining the Templar fraternity implies an experience that was both liberating and self-empowering, so the emerging conclusion is that the secret ultimately revolves around a revealed knowledge through the ritual of physical initiation—the raising of the dead—the experience of which leads to personal revelation. According to insinuations throughout esoteric books, scrolls, and sacred buildings, this was achievable through selective knowledge and the practical application of natural laws.18
When the Templars found the Essene scrolls they tapped into this tradition, the fruits of thousands of years of knowledge.19 Their work suggests it was applied in the particular design of buildings and their deliberate choice of location, as well as the strategic application of geometry, which, as science has discovered, is capable of influencing the human body to a significant degree.20
Bernard de Clairvaux was considerably partial to John the Baptist, as were the Portuguese Templars, who, under Afonso Henriques, sealed Portugal’s day of independence on his feast day, June 24. They erected a disproportionate number of churches dedicated to him, and within earshot they placed an equal amount—at least fourteen in Portugal—dedicated to Notre Dame, the Divine Virgin, who is as synonymous with Isis as she is with Mary Magdalene.
In Tomar, the Templars built three places of veneration: the church dedicated to Notre Dame at Olival, the rotunda, and a third, in the central plaza of the town, the church of John the Baptist. Inside this church, several columns are marked by the figures of the Green Man and the dragon, two potent talismans of the life force. And between them aligns an invisible arrow pointing directly to Jerusalem.
42
PRESENT ERA. APRIL. BY THE ROTUNDA, AMID THE SECRETS OF THE BEEHIVE . . .
There was something distinctly narcotic about sitting in the stillness of the cloister, and it had little to do with the whiff of lavender drifting from the octagonal flowerbed. Whoever created this courtyard certainly intended its geometry to induce a soporific assault on the senses. I soon found out the responsible party was Henry the Navigator, Templar Master during the fifteenth century. Across the square courtyard, the rotunda (or as the Portuguese refer to it, charola) stared back beyond the canopy of red roof tiles.
Access to the rotunda used to be restricted solely for initiates within the Templar Order. Even during times of siege, not even the townspeople were allowed refuge inside the safety of its six-foot-thick walls, despite it being arguably the most secure building in the citadel.1
If it never contained an altar, clearly the building was designed for a purpose other than worship. If it had no door, how did anyone get in?
Questions. Puzzles. Enigmas.
The first alterations to the rotunda were made after the dissolution of the Order of the Temple in the early fourteenth century by Pope Clement V, after which the site was temporarily abandoned. The first doorway was added perhaps a century later by Henry the Navigator when he incorporated a sacristy, or more likely by Manuel the Fortunate, who annexed an actual church as well as a chapter house, essentially mating the rotunda to a body.2 Prior to that point, access was via secret underground passageways designed as part of the initiatory practices of the Order.3
Local traditions insist that the Templars built tunnels below the rotunda leading to their mother church of Santa Maria do Olival and elsewhere throughout Tomar. Older residents I spoke with not only swear to this, they recall how their grandparents saw the tunnels when some collapsed under the town’s pavements. Some accounts were recorded. A guard who lived during the time of the last monks at the convent, in the mid-nineteenth century, claimed he himself descended a stairwell with several of the monks to a point below the town, but their progress was impeded by the fragile state of construction and the decay of the subterranean passageways, not to mention the poor quality of air, whereupon it became necessary to extinguish the torches. Later that century, the ground gave way beside the Church of the Misericords in central Tomar to reveal a tunnel leading up to the castle, and the opposite way, under the river.4
In the 1940s restorations were made to the mother church at Olival. A partly roofed tunnel was discovered, marked by a procession of air shafts aboveground.5 The passage branched off in two directions, one toward the old convent of Saint Erea, the other beneath the riverbed and toward the main plaza of Tomar, where stands the unusual church dedicated to John the Baptist. Just as the tunnel veered toward the rotunda, progress was again impeded by decay. Consequently, the entrances and exits were sealed with stone as a safety precaution.6
As recently as the 1970s a local journalist and his cameraman reportedly entered an underground chamber near a well at the entrance to the seminary adjacent to the rotunda, only to be confronted by a ghostly presence like a vapor (which was filmed), after which the journalist became very ill. Another investigative researcher was permitted by a guard to enter a subterranean chapel via a doorway inside one of the castle’s towers.7
The rotunda, and the bell tower and convent that grew around it after the fourteenth century.
It seemed as though a number of people over the centuries had come in contact with the periphery of the rotunda’s chamber of Mysteries, the only missing piece being definitive proof of the chamber itself. But at least I was not alone in my frustration. In 1988 an international group of experts wanted to know what lay in the basement of the Convent of Tomar, knowing there are entries, now sealed, and that elsewhere the Templars built a tunnel ninety feet below the ground. They liaised with the Institute of Geophysics, whose ground-penetrating radar was capable of detecting cavities up to 120 feet deep without leaving as much as a pinprick on the floor, yet despite this obviously unobtrusive and nondestructive scientific technique, the Portuguese Ministry of Culture inexplicably prohibited all investigations.8
Having made an appointment to see the director of the Convent of Christ (as the entire site is known today), I brought up the question of a secret underground chamber below the rotunda, but she could not help any further; in fact, what I had managed to dig up so far in archives seemed to put my own research ahead of the curve. She also had no knowledge of the proposed ground-penetrating radar experiments, but informed me of a second experiment in 2011, the results of which were somewhat inconclusive. I pressed for details of the institute pursuing this work, but the replies ceased, as though my nose had reached deep enough into the honeypot. After that, all follow-up communications were ignored by the director, as were those to the convent’s architect and technical advisor.
It is easy to claim a conspiracy of silence is at play in Tomar even centuries after the Knights Templar and the Ordre de Sion colluded to establish a piece of the Graal in Portugal, as insinuated by the cryptic seal of Afonso Henriques on the charter that gave the knights this very parcel of land. Given how so many knights paid with their lives to maintain its secrecy, this is not surprising. What is both s
urprising and reassuring is that the secret may be alive and well.
The problem with conspiracies is they tend to dilate relative to the lack of solid facts. What I needed was more information.
Ancient places—such as Jerusalem—are riddled with secret underground passages, complicated vaults, cisterns, and aqueducts, and thanks to the efforts of Captains Warren and Wilson and their surveyors in 1867, their existence was brought to light.9 However, just because something hides in the dark does not imply a great mystery or secret is at work. Relative to the times in which they were built, such subterranean passages were essential to the survival of local people; some were used for mundane affairs such as the collection of water and food, the provision of shelter, or as a means of escape. It’s those that fall outside such categories that are of interest, and both physical and scriptural evidence does show how specific chambers in sacred places were reserved for special ritual purposes.
Signs that an esoteric tradition was once practiced lie scattered all around the periphery of the rotunda in Tomar. Adjacent to the building’s foundation stands the Cloister of Cleansing, the term implying ablution, whiteness, and spiritual purification. Sects who honored the ritual of baptism (such as the Essenes, Nasoreans, Mandeans, Sabeans, Cathars, and so on) maintained a morning ritual of daily bathing before entering their sanctuaries. Being situated on the basement level, the Cloister of Cleansing sits two floors below the level of the floor of the rotunda, and it does not require a leap of imagination to visualize initiates ritually washing themselves of impure thoughts prior to immersing themselves in the Mysteries.*37 Dispersed throughout this cloister is a collection of unusual circular limestone blocks, each carved with the figures of sacred geometry—pentagrams, hexagrams, heptagrams. Archaeologists are hard-pressed to explain them, so officially they have been given the designation of gravestones, even though they resemble teaching aids; after all, understanding sacred geometry was fundamental to esoteric schools.
