by Hitt, Jack
Soon after the arrests, 127 charges were leveled against the Knights Templar. Nearly the entire indictment was fiction, but a few of the charges were quite colorful, and word of them spread quickly. During Templar initiation, the knights kissed each other on the mouth, then the navel (some interpret this to be the penis), and finally (no uncertainty here) the anus. Also during initiation, the novitiates had to spit or piss on the cross. They had to profess worship to a bedizened idol named Baphomet. Finally, they had to submit to homosexual orgies on demand. According to the confession of Templar grand dignitary Hugues de Pairaud, “I would tell [the novitiates] that if they felt any natural heat that pushed them toward incontinence, they had permission to cool it with the other brothers.”
The confessions poured out quickly and voluminously from all the Templars, even Grand Master Jacques de Molay, because of an innovation in interrogation, the Inquisition. Already the Dominicans in charge were known by a Latin pun on their cruelty: Domini canes, the “dogs of God.” The rules and regulations governing the use of torture were recent—Pope Urban IV wrote them in 1262—and they were full of loopholes. Essentially anything was permissible, as long as it resulted in neither “mutilation, incurable wounds, violent effusion of blood, nor death.” The Beautiful tested the outer limits of these porous restrictions. His men stuffed rags in the mouths of some men and poured water in their nostrils. They threw knights in pits and left them to starve. They tied them to the rack. The inquisitors hog-tied the defendants’ limbs and dragged them up and down hills. They branded them with hot irons. Other knights were submitted to the strappado, in which the victim had his hands tied behind his back and then hanged by the wrists with weights attached to his feet or genitals. In other jails a Templar’s feet were rubbed with animal fat and simply set on fire. At one trial a knight arrived on stumps that concluded at his shins.
Not surprisingly, the Templars confessed to everything: homosexuality, pissing on the cross, bum kissing, idol worshiping. One Templar said that he would have “killed the Lord if it were asked of him.” When asked why the Templars shrouded their initiation ceremony in such secrecy, one knight replied sadly, because we “were stupid.” Which is probably as close to the truth as any answer. The Templars were largely illiterate. Grand Master Jacques de Molay could not read. The library at the Commandery of Corbins was found to house sixteen books. The Templar James of Garrigans stood out as a wonder because he could “write shaped letters well, and illuminate with gold.”
The pope by this time, Clement V, was a compromise candidate and therefore politically weak. He realized he had been outmaneuvered by the Beautiful and sought to reclaim his authority by ordering the Templars to stand trial.
Initially it looked good for the pope and his frightened army. Jacques de Molay retracted his confession, and 597 Templars soon followed his lead. The pope successfully delayed the trial with papal paper pushing and blue-ribbon commissions until the spring of 1310. And the French king had no physical evidence for the trial.
But the Beautiful was not one to lie back in defeat. He had insisted that smaller, minor trials of the Templars be carried out at the local level throughout France. In Paris, one such proceeding was presided over by the brother of the king’s finance minister and a royal toad. When events began to move in the pope’s favor, this judge pronounced the Knights Templar before his court guilty and sentenced them to die—that afternoon.
By sundown and before anyone could intervene, 54 men were tied to stakes and set on fire. Observers reported that many of them shouted their innocence from the flames. Even the peasants in the audience, not known for their queasiness at such events, grew sick and scared. More sentences were hastily issued, and some 70 more were immolated. In the frenzy, some dead Templars were exhumed, their rotting corpses strapped to stakes and set on fire for good measure.
This tactic had an effect. The Templars who had retracted their confessions now retracted their retractions and begged for mercy. The pope was in a terrible bind and moved swiftly to cut his losses. On March 20, 1312, he dissolved the Templars and ordered their holdings to be dispersed.
There was still one loose end for the Beautiful. Grand Master Jacques de Molay and one other high official refused to confess. On March 18, 1314, the Beautiful set up two stakes on a small island in the Seine River in Paris. Amid defiant cries of innocence, the last of the surviving unpenitent Templars were burned.
The Beautiful’s ham-fisted tactics didn’t serve him well for long. The media of the day turned against him. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Beautiful is likened to “the second Pilate” whose cruelty has grown “so insatiate that without decree / His greedy sails upon the Temple intrude.” And among the peasants, stories began to be heard. On the day of the arrests, it was said, de Molay had instructed his nephew to take the “treasure” hidden in two hollow pillars that adorned the choir stalls of the Paris temple and flee. And from the flames, de Molay predicted that the menacing king and the spineless pope would soon join him in death, which they did. At sundown, the day de Molay burned, a few men saw monks swim out to the island, paw through the warm ashes, and dog-paddle back to shore with something— some say bones—clenched in their teeth.
When I return to the church rectory in Ponferrada—a catacomb of sleeping rooms—I sidle along the narrow pilgrim’s corridor in search of a bed. The place is buzzing with secret conversations to which I am not invited. The doors are built with thin light plywood so that my inquiries begin with a sudden whoosh. A naked German man is hopping about on one leg, confounded by the second hole in his underpants. I apologize, and the door slam shuts—blam—like a rifle shot.
Whoosh: Paolo looks up from a lumpy mattress, disturbed from a nap. Blam.
Whoosh: Javier is explaining Marcus Aurelius to another pilgrim. Blam.
Whoosh. Ah! The bathroom, and no lock on the door. An unfamiliar old woman undressed from the waist up except for a sturdy bra washes herself at the sink. A hurried apology. Blam.
Whoosh. Willem is writing his daily missive beside an empty mattress.
Pilgrim decorum requires that he offer me the available bed, which he does plaintively. I drop my bag. Willem’s unease at my arrival causes him to overcompensate by spilling the afternoon’s secret. Louis and some select pilgrims will be eating dinner tonight at a special restaurant, a place recommended by one of Louis’s many friends on the road.
The evening sky is a gray cast-iron dome. Streaked clouds have backed off high enough to nuzzle among blinking stars. A huge dump at the edge of town is the resting spot of hundreds of storks. At the blast of a truck’s horn or a factory whistle, they panic into swirls of flight and swoop over the town. En route to Louis’s restaurant, our small band crosses the river beside the fortress. A pacified covey of storks circles slowly before turning on bended wing back to the dump in search of frogs. Willem notes the beauty of their bucket jaws dangling in silhouette. “A hundred babies are being born tonight,” he says.
The restaurant is not fancy, rather a workingman’s joint with huge platters of meat, a vegetable or two, and cheap prices. The other diners are all farmers or laborers who have come here for the same reason we have. They check us out as if we are new workers freshly arrived in town. We wear their faces and the same worn-out togs. At times we sit at the table in the same exhausted silence, elbows on the table, eyes gazing nowhere, a single fork standing disconsolately in the air.
A bottle of wine or two and our spirits are lubricated enough to resume conversation. Louis is in command. He knows the people, the owner of the restaurant, and the lay of the land. By the end of the evening, Louis is explaining the mystery of the Knights Templar and the significance of the giant castle.
After the destruction of the Templars, legend has it that they brought some great mystery, some object, to be housed here in one of the most sacred and largest of their temples, Ponferrada. Louis states that this particular fortress is unique in that it is the only one that seems deliberately to resis
t the geometrically ordered plan of most Templar constructions. Each turret, with its curving shape or peculiar corners, perfectly mimics a constellation in the sky. Two rounded turrets connected by a small stone bridge, still intact, is obviously the zodiacal sign of Gemini, the twins. Louis says that on specific days of the year, the towers align with the constellations in the sky. Some say that on those special nights when the mystery of the castle on earth matches the mystery of the stars in heaven, something is revealed.
One theory holds that splendid shafts of light penetrate an oddly arranged set of windows in one of the rooms, pointing to a sacred spot. There, perhaps, lies whatever it is that the Tern-plars kept hidden. One source suggests that the mystery is the store of knowledge the Templars inherited during their time in the Holy Land, the esoteric secrets of the Pyramid builders. Others say that it is the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant. Even others declare that secreted away, somewhere among the stones of Ponferrada, is the very knowledge learned by Adam when he sank his teeth into the apple.
The wine has rendered us all helpless in the wake of Louis’s stories. We are pilgrims, anxious to make sense of the mystery of why we put ourselves on this road. A night of mysticism dampens the earlier jokes and observations. The forks resume their abstracted position, wagging in the air, pointing to the heavens. The walk back across the bridge is made in silence. The center of town is occupied by the great meandering castle, a field of darkness ringed by the pale streetlights of the city.
Louis and the others enter a bar for a drink. Other pilgrims have gathered, and the talk is of Ponferrada, the Templars, the mystery. On a wall outside, the anarchists have painted a giant slogan. Tus pesadillas son mis sueños: “Your nightmares are my dreams.” A bookstore across the street has a window display advertising a collection of books on the Knights Templar. I excuse myself. As I push open the door, a stick at the top rakes across a set of harmonic chimes, filling the room with the tranquil melodies of a New Age shop.
The books look so inviting, dust jackets swirling in creamy brilliant colors, fantastic emblems and personages, and such promises. The secrets of the Knights Templar. The hidden truths of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The true story behind the many (recent) sightings of the Virgin Mary. The revival of paganism. The wanton practices of witches. An encyclopedia of angels.
The heavenly octave has summoned from the rear the proprietress. Even in Spain she looks like her American counterpart, a dirty blonde with fallen shoulders, wraparound print skirt, tank top, sandals, and headband. She walks past shelves of books and tables of lava lamps and astronomical maps and glow-in-the-dark rosaries and jars of crystals and geodes of all sizes. They even sell those eight-balls I used to buy as a child; shake them up and a message appears. Mine reads “Try again.” Her face is a tired expression of pinched eyes, expansive crow’s-feet, and downturned lips, as if she had decoded the mystical universal puzzle, and the great truth was to buy low and sell high.
She is counting out a fistful of peseta bills from a cash register, tallying up the day’s take in esoteric truth. Capitalism and mysticism make very awkward companions. I tell her I am a pilgrim en route to Santiago and am interested in the latest research on the castle across the way. She jerks her head toward the dozen books in the window.
“Ponferrada is filled with specialists on the castle,” she tells me. She mentions a few names of locals to whom I might want to talk. Then she opens one book to a page of fat type and reveals one theory she finds particularly curious.
The Templars had a secret code to which only the highest twelve members of the order were privy. In the event of some catastrophe, such as the near annihilation that took place in the early 1300s, any one of these surviving members could come to Ponferrada and just by taking in the architecture could “read” the stones and know where the great mystery was hidden. That code turns on the letter T, or Tau, which signifies the Templars and the cross and is somehow related to the number twelve, which in turn harkens to all kinds of associations—master Templars, apostles, months, zodiac signs. Only one Templar establishment had twelve towers—Ponferrada.
Scholars studying the fort here have discovered that, just as Louis said, the towers mimic the constellations in the sky. The problem is, they are not in the proper order ever to match the stars in the sky. So this author—she points to a page of outlines of towers and connect-the-dot renditions of the constellations— figured out that the towers, taken in the order of their construction, must spell out a code. Some of these towers even have the mysterious T carved on lintels or beside doorways. If one writes down the first letters of the zodiacal names of each of these towers, including the signifier T, then it spells... absolutely nothing.
But then this author remembered that the Templars were drawn to the number 2. For Templars, the symbolism of two as one was powerful, and she proved this by reminding me that the original seal of the Templars was a horse carrying two knights as if they were a single rider. Okay, so look once again at the names of those turrets (in Spanish and substitute “Señora” for Virgo): Tauro Castor, Géminis, Poloux, Libra, Cáncer, Vaso, Señora, Sagitario, Escorpión, Capricornio, Peces, and Aries. And now take the first two letters of each in this order and you form a kind of sentence: Taca ge poli cava se sale escape arcano. It doesn’t quite match up. But, she explains, one must jiggle with the letters a bit because (I lost her here) something or other about old Spanish and modern Spanish. Whatever, one ends up with this sentence: En la taca que hay en la “g” de la ciudad, cava, se sale al escape (o entrada) del gran secreto. More or less, it means “In the room in which there is a ‘g’ in the city, dig there, and come away with the great secret.” The author of this book believes that the Ark of the Covenant is hidden below this special room in a cathedral cave filled with Templar wealth.
“Has the author entered this wondrous cavern?” I ask.
“He cannot enter,” she tells me sadly.
“Why not?”
“Ponferrada is a Spanish treasure, registered in Madrid. He has applied to the government for permission to dig below the room, but the officials won’t let anyone disturb a national landmark. They probably think he is crazy. So, until there is some change in the government, we may never know.”
She screws up her face and snorts in disgust. Bureaucrats.
I peel off the equivalent of ten dollars for the book. But she says it is only seven. The key to the secret of the Templars has been marked down.
The accusations against the Templars didn’t immediately play well in neighboring Spain or across the Channel in England, where the knights were still held in favor. But after the papal dissolution, the monarchs saw an opportunity. In Spain, James of Aragon dispatched an army to occupy the Templar castle of Peniscola. Better to be prudent.
After the settlement of Templar property and wealth throughout Europe, what survived was their story—a splendid drama of political jostling, gems, gold, Crusades, forts, popes, kings, and divine mysteries. The Templar story was so fertile that it eventually became everything to everyone. Voltaire rewrote the story as a tale of ecclesiastical tyranny. For others it became a proof of monarchal oppressions. Antichurch propagandists of the seventeenth century performed the difficult trick of recasting the illiterate Templars into wise philosophers who foresaw the wrongheadedness of Catholic orthodoxy-—cunning dissidents trying to work for change from within.
Almost five hundred years after the Beautiful’s auto-da-fé, King Louis XVI was executed by guillotine during the French Revolution. It is said that a member of the Freemasons, the reputed heirs to the Templars, jumped onto the wooden platform. He ran his fingers through the king’s blood, flung droplets over the crowd, and shouted, “Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!”
The most lucrative retelling of the Templar story repositioned them as warlocks and mystics, possessors of written secrets, hidden treasures, and powerful relics. This rewriting began in 1531 with the publication of De Occulta Philosophia, a sixteenth-century best-sel
ler by the most notorious alchemist and magus of the day, Cornelius Heinrich Agrippa von Nettesheim. In his book, Agrippa had merely mentioned the Templars alongside another group of sorcerers called the Bogomils, whom he alleged had orgies, burned the resulting babies, and made bread from the ashes. A later book mixed up the allusions until it was believed that the Templars had a ritual orgy to impregnate a select nun. After the baby was born, the knights gathered in a circle and roughly tossed the newborn around in a circle until it died. The infant’s corpse was later roasted, and the oil from its flesh was used to wax the idol Baphomet.
Scarcely a decade passed without the emergence of a clubby group of brave mystics, such as the Freemasons, who married a new nostalgia for knights with a tincture of their magic (but not enough to warrant charges of witchcraft or heresy). They wore impressive uniforms, and the most convincing of them made good livings peddling elixirs, cures, alchemical formulae, and the secrets of transmutation. They spoke of their allegiance to “unknown superiors” and assumed increasingly orotund titles. One neo-Templar in England was known as the Knight of the Great Lion of the High Order of the Lords of the Temple of Jerusalem.
The exact identity of the Templar mystery was hard to pin down. Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote Parzival and connected the Templars with the Holy Grail. Others claimed it was the Ark of the Covenant. Another school said the knights brought back from the Holy Land the mysteries of engineering and that a breach in security resulted in Gothic architecture. Still others traced the game of chess to the Templars. More recently the Shroud of Turin is credited to the Templars. It was once in the possession of the family of Geoffrey de Charney, the occupant of the neighboring stake when de Molay burned.
