by Freddy Silva
Templar gravestones, the convenient official explanation.
The cloister’s relative position on the eastern quadrant of the rotunda may provide an answer, for in the tradition of temple design this compass position corresponds with rebirth, when the clean light of the sun reappears at dawn following its immersion in the underworld, hence, why it was the direction associated with resurrection rituals performed in ancient Mysteries schools and temples.10
But as for a smoking gun proving that elusive chamber of Mysteries, well, there’s nothing quite like an itch you can’t scratch.
By the time I’d spent several days wandering the convent, the staff and I had gotten to know each other well. In the morning they would waive the normal entrance formalities and beckon me to resume my musings. One day was devoted entirely to looking at the ceiling of every chamber, and notes were made on the hundreds of bosses and capitals holding up every vault and pillar. Never did I realize how staring at ceilings could be so educational. There were laurels and quatrefoils, Templar crosses and armillary spheres, cherubs and oak leaves, all repeated aplenty throughout. But three carvings appeared only once above ground, and purposefully so. They sit in a small rectangular antechamber adjacent to the monks’ refectory to the west of the rotunda. Except for a locked, dark-green door added in recent times there is nothing of interest to warrant passing tourists to pause; only by looking up at the ceiling does the chamber stop you dead in your tracks: two arches, each held up by effigies of a dismembered head spouting vegetation—the Green Man himself, tutelary god of regeneration. Between them, and the only time it appears throughout the entire property, a boss depicting the three faces of Hermes Trismegistus, the thrice-great god of wisdom, Djehuti. If I were to build a chamber dedicated to the Mysteries, it would be right beneath this vault.
Whatever lay there was blocked by that dark-green door. After gaining permission to unlock it, behold, a narrow limestone staircase spiraled downward. Walking into the darkness my footsteps echoed with a kind of timbre only heard in perfectly toned acoustic environments. A small passageway led to an empty stone balcony, beyond which lay a plain stone staircase of eight steps leading down to a large hall shrouded in the half-light from a doorway 112-feet away.
The three faces of Hermes Trismegistus. Rotunda of Tomar.
The hall was allegedly used as a wine cellar. However, the storage of wine requires a cool, dry environment, and yet this is easily one of the dampest parts of the convent. While it is not unusual for buildings of this age to be reused according to the evolving needs of the times, I was skeptical that the builders should have identified its access point (which I was not even aware of) with the only image of the god of wisdom, then coincidentally placed a clockwise spiral staircase underneath (symbolic of inward journeying), leading to a hall whose mathematical footprint transposes to the musical equivalent of a double octave—all for the purpose of storing fermented grapes. It does not add up.
Sacred places the world over were built with the application of natural laws relative to the environment the architect wished to generate. Each measurement, color, and motif, the building’s apparent and concealed geometry, even its alignment to reflect certain stars were all carefully considered to reinforce the purpose for which the temple was created.11 No detail was superfluous.12 It is a science called the Law of Correspondence, one of the many forms of the knowledge contained in the curriculum of the Mysteries schools.13
Logo of the Ordre de Sion. Rotunda of Tomar.
This alleged wine cellar sits three to four levels below the floor of the rotunda. The more I walked around, the more the clues pointed to an altogether different and original function. There are nine bosses cemented to the spine of the ceiling, the esoteric number equated with perfection. Of these, two differ in design. The fourth boss bears a Templar cross with a rose in the center—the rose cross, emblem of the Abbey of Notre Dame du Mont de Sion at the time of its inception.14
I could hardly believe I was staring at the logo of a brotherhood with roots dating back to the Egyptian Mysteries school of Tuthmosis III,15 whose teachings were promulgated by Plato, the Samaritan magi (founded by the grandfather of Mary Magdalene), and a gnostic brotherhood in old Alexandria called the Brothers of the Red Cross,*38 established by a mystic named Ormus.16
Ormus*39 is an adopted name, a word synonymous with the principle of Light, and its earliest reference appears in Zoroastrian teachings. It is highly likely Godefroi de Bouillon was familiar with ormus as a concept of enlightenment because it later became the nickname adopted by the Ordre de Sion.†417 A curious anagram was designed to express this word: an M with an added appendage, where two of its “legs” are crossed to form the astrological sign of Virgo, and the symbol of Notre Dame and Mary Magdalene.‡1 In-between this curious M sit the letters OURS, the French word for “bear,” or in Latin, Ursus,18 the name of the leader of the monks residing at Orval with whom Godefroi de Bouillon was associated.
The technique used for this anagram is identical in method to the seal designed by Afonso Henriques to encode the word Graal in PORTUGRAL.
Staring at the ceiling was getting me somewhere, so I continued. On either side of the rose cross, and the only time they appear in this hall, are two bosses depicting the Green Man.
As I approached the ninth and final boss, it too differed significantly from the others: a circular sunburst of seventeen rays, not unlike the Buddhist symbol of the total unfolding of the crown, with a small rose at the center.
Dividing a circle into seventeen makes for awkward mathematics and deviates from a standard stonemason’s practice. However, to a Scottish Rite Freemason (whose foundation dates to 1314 with the arrival in Scotland of Templar knight, Robert of Heredom),19 seventeen represents one of the Order’s most profound degrees, the Knight of the East and West, dealing as it does with the raw spiritual power of the initiate, a kind of personal resurrection.
There exists another structure where this number is highly significant: the Osirion, the underground chamber at Abydos whose side chambers number seventeen and where the Mysteries teachings of Osiris were once practiced.
Plan of the rotunda and the later additions that became the convent.
Beneath the boss of the “wine cellar” lies an exposed shaft that sits inconveniently, and dangerously, in front of a doorway leading out to the orchard. It is not known where the shaft leads to, but given what we do know so far, if this unusual room really was originally designed to function as a wine cellar then I am the barber of Seville!
Encouraged by these discoveries, I ventured out into the orchard to absorb their implications. The Templars and the Ordre de Sion had obviously been collaborating here in Tomar, and since both the “wine cellar” and the room above it (the one with the boss of Hermes) are of later construction, obviously the Orders’ rituals were continued by subsequent members.
Strolling beneath the canopy of lemon and orange trees I made my way to what used to be the principal entrance into the castle, the Almedina Gate. This south gate is today hardly visited, its staircase lies in a state of disrepair, and beyond it, vines and undergrowth have conquered the citadel’s wall. However, one detail is visible above the gate, a stone carved with a large Templar rose cross. The surrounding inscription reveals its date, 1160, the year of the founding of the rotunda.20 The presence in Tomar of the Knights Templar and the Ordre de Sion is once again reinforced. But it is the symbol to the top left of the rose cross that is of greater interest: a master mason’s mark depicting, in stylized form, the three arrows “shot” by Gualdino Paes that established the location for the rotunda.
Lower level hall, originally used for the Mysteries.
I returned to the rotunda to conclude what was turning out to be a long yet productive day. The overcast sky finally dissolved to allow a few rays of sunlight to penetrate the windows high along the rotunda’s curving walls. It was at that moment I gazed up and noticed something found nowhere else throughout the convent or the Te
mplar monuments of Tomar: the opaque white-and-gold glass was made entirely of honeycombs.
Images of the Green Man flank the boss of the Rose Cross.
Mason’s mark to the top left of the rose cross and, below, variations of the same mark.
All this time I had been standing inside the beehive.
I walked under the central octagonal canopy. So many clues leading to the chamber of Mysteries I was certain lay right beneath my feet. If only I could lift the flagstone floor, even for just one second.
The window of the beehive.
Perhaps I didn’t have to. There exists an oral account by an elderly resident of Valado dos Frades who recalled an incident sometime around the end of the nineteenth century:
It was said in old times that master masons and carpenters were hired from the town to work on the maintenance of the castle of Thomar. This was many generations ago. It was the habit of one of these masters to return home and register the alterations made inside the castle, because these would continue until much of what was old would be made unrecognizable or made to disappear. One of the things that riled him the most was the disfiguration of the beautiful and intriguing Arab pathway that the old monks of the Temple used in their ceremonies and led directly to the basement of the Temple church [the rotunda].
Even in those days the brothers living in the convent used to share, from memory, stories with the masons of how Gualdino Paes brought back from the Holy Land the plans of the Holy Sepulcher which were to be used for the construction of the rotunda. Master Gualdino also ordered a pathway leading to it to be constructed in the Arabic style, and that both were used not just for religious ceremonies but also for the investiture of new knights.21
The monks also spoke of the Templar Master returning from the Holy Land with many scrolls. He kept them safely in a room excavated out of the rock, which was to the right of its main entrance and had a doorway the monks referred to as the “gate to the underworld.” This doorway rested on very old stonework upon whose uprights the Templars carved dragons, and on the supported lintel, a kind of winged serpent.22
Tradition states that an old Jew was the only person permitted to enter the cave to work on the translation of the scrolls. Later, this man spoke of the results of his labor and how several volumes of manuscripts had been translated into Latin: “Much later, the stonework was dismantled and everything was patched, including much of the Arab pathway, which was never seen again.”23
The master mason left a descriptive record of the construction work performed at the rotunda and the castle of Tomar, but the whereabouts of the book were forgotten. “Then in 1936 the parish priest of Valado found an old book behind the altar of the chapel of S. Sebastian that may have belonged to the master mason, but the priest threw it into a fire. Nevertheless, the stories have long since spread through oral tradition.”24
During recent attempts to beautify the perimeter of the castle of Tomar, an area was cleared around the original Almedina Gate. A chunk of the pathway that once accessed the gate from the outside has been eroded or destroyed, revealing a twenty-foot drop in the terrain around the base of the wall. Right under where the pathway used to be lies a doorway into a cave. The official position is that this cave is a mine, yet who in their right mind would open a mine in a location that undermines the foundations of a castle wall?
The lintel stone is still in place, and indeed a kind of winged serpent is carved upon it, flanked by the heads of two dragons from whose mouths emanate a series of circles, now badly eroded, and two crescent moons.
The two uprights that would have constituted the body of each dragon are missing. However, a drawing made in 1918 shows the engravings still in their entirety, accompanied by a description of which parts of the Arab pathway were visible inside the subterranean passages and led to the chamber beneath the rotunda.*4025
Entrance below the Almedina Gate, whose tunnels lead to a chamber under the rotunda; the lintel with carved dragons remains in situ.
43
PRESENT ERA. APRIL. MUSING OUTSIDE THE BEEHIVE . . .
What could possibly have happened to the scrolls Master Gualdino secreted in that underground chamber? Not to mention their decoded text, from which one lone, old Jewish scholar extracted copious manuscripts?
On occasion, knowledge and drinking go together rather well. To understand the Mysteries, and specifically the ritual of resurrection, it is first necessary to “drink” of the knowledge, to imbibe from the “cup of everlasting life.” The Chinese referred to the process as Dao, the Essenes as the Way, the Greeks called it sophis, and the Templars, baphomet.
One emblem representing this tradition is the three faces of Hermes, the Greek personification of Djehuti, thrice great scribe of the gods.1 Luminaries such as Copernicus and Kepler claimed their achievements were a result of studying the concealed sacred arts of Djehuti,2 Kepler himself admitting he was merely “stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians.”3 Even the seventeenth-century scientist Isaac Newton stated that his law of gravity was not new, that it had been decoded in antiquity, and his knowledge of universal processes as well as his own conclusions in physics stemmed from esoteric wisdom, specifically from the decrypting of hermetic and alchemical treatises, not to mention the cryptic language of prophetic biblical scriptures.4 Newton went so far as to unravel codes hidden within the books of Ezekiel and Revelations, even learning Hebrew so he could get it right. He reconstructed the floor plan of the Temple of Solomon, convinced that the edifice deliberately built to house the Ark of the Covenant was a cryptogram of the universe and by understanding it one would know the mind of God—precisely as it was claimed of the teachings of Djehuti.5 As Newton said himself, “The Egyptians concealed mysteries that were above the capacity of the common herd, under the veil of religious rites and hieroglyphic symbols.”6
Djehuti. And later, Thoth-Hermes.
Newton was a prolific writer, a member of a Masonic-style institution, and alleged Grand Master of the Priuré de Sion, the name by which the Ordre de Sion became known after 1188 following a historically documented ceremony.7 Given the associations between these fraternities and the Knights Templar, it is revealing that when Newton’s hitherto unknown private manuscripts came to light, the economist John Maynard Keynes commented on the significance of Newton’s sources and in so doing may have revealed the kind of knowledge the Templars and Bernard de Clairvaux had been privy to: “[He saw] the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had hid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found . . . in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation.”8
During their formative years in Jerusalem, the Templars would have had time to absorb local esoteric influences, particularly those from the descendents of a group of gnostics called the Sabeans who compiled a great hermetic book on magic called Ghayat al hakim (The Goal of the Wise). This valuable work was translated into Latin in Moorish Spain during the same period the Templars were settling down in Portugal. It was renamed Picatrix.9 Much like the Templar scroll decrypted by Lambert de Saint-Omer, it too contained a blueprint for the utopian hermetic city,10 along with 224 manuscripts on hermeticism, Kaballah, astrology, magic, and alchemy—the kind of tome one would dedicate seven quiet years in Jerusalem to read, absorb, and understand. Not surprisingly, it is considered one of the most exhaustive works on talismanic magic in existence.
The Sabeans were an Arabic sect living in Harran, a province in modern-day southeastern Turkey and not far from some of the world’s oldest sacred sites. Sabean comes from saba’ia, (star people). They venerated the moon—symbol of Djehuti—and were known to have undertaken yearly pilgrimages to the Giza Plateau to conduct astronomical observations, recognizing the pyramids as monuments mirroring the stars, which ult
imately proved to be a correct deduction.11
Derived from the word saba’ia is the Portuguese word sabia (scholar); its extensions are saber (knowledge) and sabedoria (wisdom).
Where did the Sabeans acquire their knowledge?
After the library and light of Alexandria were extinguished at the end of the fourth century AD by a rampaging mob of Christian fundamentalists (who were not much fun but certainly very mental), the knowledge moved north to Edessa and then to Harran, where an academy was established to enable the hermetic teachings of alchemy and symbolism to permeate the Islamic world and, by extension, the area in and around Jerusalem.
Alchemy comes from the Arabic al-khem, ironically the old name for Egypt. So to practice alchemy is to know “matter that comes from Egypt.” The Greeks acknowledged their gratitude to the Egyptian Mysteries by calling that land Khemet, and khemia, the art of transmuting an ordinary metal into gold. Except that in the esoteric world such alchemy has little to do with transforming minerals and all to do with altering the individual through knowledge, and when such a person is “transformed into gold,” so it is said he or she is “risen from the dead.”
Old Thamara would have been an ideal place to drink or imbibe such knowledge. The town’s oldest known iteration is atamarmah, an Arabic word meaning “sweet waters,” a description of the river flowing through it. The Templars’ adapted the name to Thomar, and it too is a play on words in Portuguese, for it literally means “to drink, to imbibe, to ingest.” For the Templars, then, Tomar was sabedoria, the location where wisdom is to be imbibed.
