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1159. CERAS. A PILE OF RUBBLE NEAR A DILAPIDATED TOWN . . .

Silence and perpetual remoteness from all secular turmoil that compels the mind to meditate upon celestial things.” It was Bernard de Clairvaux’s decree by which discipline is brought to a world governed by perpetual chaos. Amid an age of anarchy, his Buddhist ideal—New Age even—set a rare example of order.

The Cistercian model required a retirement from the sight of human habitation, insofar as it was possible. Thus, Cistercian properties tended to be located in some forgotten valley, a lonely hilltop, or some other empty, deserted environment. And in twelfth-century Portugal there was no better place than the depopulated territory around Ceras. This may partly explain why Bernard’s monks and a group of affiliated Templar knights chose the furthermost corner of Europe to create afresh a country in which their utopia might be fully realized.

The Cistercians were masters of raising lands from the dead. “Give the Cistercians a desert and in a few years you will find a dignified abbey in the midst of smiling plenty,” wrote the medieval chronicler Gerald de Barri. He was right. They drained marshes, tamed wild woods, and resuscitated the soil. The Templars who settled in Ceras would apply these principles to rebuild an entire functioning community within a handful of years, while 33 miles away in Alcobaça, the Cistercians in their new monastery traded surplus food with local towns and cities. And between them they created a paradise.

When Master Gualdino Paes and the Templars first moved to the region all they had to work with was a tumbledown old church with grass growing out of its creviced façade. Nevertheless, they took refuge inside its sacred walls and used as beds the broken pews and the floor of damp flagstones. No doubt Bernard de Clairvaux would have nodded in approval from heaven.

From the church’s position on a flood plain populated by oaks and elms and the clear waters of the river Nabão, they gazed up at a limestone hill and an acropolis in dire need of substantial rebuilding.¹ Below, the town of Thamara consisted of no more than ramshackle remains and rubble. It was quite a downgrade from their first home in Fonte Arcada back in 1125, or Braga, Souré, or Santarém for that matter,² but nevertheless they set about making plans for their fifth and final home in Portugal.

Whatever attracted the Templars to this place attracted others thousands of years earlier.³ By 480 BC, a town had been founded by a tribe of Lusitanian Celts called the Turduli, who named it Nabancia, in honor of the goddess of sacred waters; two hundred years later, the Visigoths moved in and with them came a Benedictine monastery, which grew into two, along with a host of nearby sanctuaries. One was a sacred cave by the river Nabão, a sanctuary where the virgin Erea practiced her orations.

Benedictine monastery and statue of Saint Erea.

Erea^*23 was born into a wealthy family of Nabancia and joined the Benedictine monastery, where she became a very learned woman whose great intellect complemented her beauty. She used her knowledge to improve the lives of locals, and in time she was beloved by them. Particularly the local men. Needless to say, a woman of such magnitude inevitably attracted a foolish man vying for her affections. He came in the form of a youth named Britaldo, son of a noble family, whose unrequited love for Erea drove him to sickness that no remedy could cure.

The young man’s family held her responsible for bewitching their son, and if that was not pressure enough, Erea’s spiritual counsel also lusted after her, but upon learning he was one of many men with a bulge in his loins, he was overcome with jealousy and handed Erea a laced drink, giving the unsuspecting woman the outward signs of pregnancy. Predictably, she was expelled from the monastery.

She found her way to the cave by the river, and there she stayed awhile in contemplation and prayer until one of Britaldo’s servants tracked her down and killed her in an act of revenge, stripping her of clothes as proof of his deed before dumping her naked body in the river.⁴

At this point, the story takes an extraordinary turn, particularly in relation to the Templars who had just moved upriver from Santarém to what used to be old Nabancia. The currents carrying Erea’s body merged with those of the river Tejo, flowing south until the waters of the ancient river finally deposited her lifeless body gently upon a sandbar below the old city of Scallabis, 33 nautical miles from its point of origin. As is the case with legends of many holy people, her body remained incorruptible throughout the ages and a cult developed, so much so that the city where her body washed up was renamed in her honor to Sancta Irene, and finally Santarém—the birthplace of Prior Arnaldo da Rocha and the city that the Templars “lost” in favor of a seemingly useless territory and its decaying town of Thamara, whose patron saint is Erea.

So it would appear the Templars inherited a worthless plot of land just to follow in the footsteps of a local martyr. But to what end?

At some point after a Roman occupation, Nabancia was destroyed by a flash flood, and with it drained the fortunes of all who lived and prayed there. When the Arabs repopulated the area, they found the town in much the same condition the Templars did. They rebuilt it and renamed it Thamara^*24 (also spelled Ta’amarah and Tamara),⁵ meaning palm tree.⁶ Since the local climate of that era was too cold to support such a variety of tree, it is an odd choice of name for a town.

The Arab lords were said to have been tolerant to the locals; they allowed them to cultivate their lands and continue their laws, and it was not unusual for mosques and Christian churches to be sited side by side.⁷ When Afonso Henriques and the Templar army reached Thamara in March 1159, the town was guarded only by a token army of Moors, which was quickly dispatched thanks to the knights, who took the watchman by surprise.

The king then donated the town and its municipality of Ceras to the Order of the Temple under Gualdino Paes by way of a former promise, implying the Templars had earlier put in a request for this specific location.⁸

By the time they moved to Thamar (as the name was also spelled at the time), the Templars were already in possession of hundreds of properties throughout Portugal, all in far better shape than this one. Thamar was in tatters; it was situated on a plain prone to attack by Saracen and Moorish outlaws, only the seven gentle hills overlooking it from the west could be deemed a defensive position, and even that required a little imagination given that the fortification was also decrepit.^*25

Against standard military practice, not to mention common sense, Gualdino and the Templars ditched the safety of the hill in favor of the exposed old church on the river plain and took up residence there. Paes is said to have overseen its reconstruction take precedence over the fortifications, despite the two sites being within walking distance of each other, and for a whole year they mustered all resources to this exercise. They located the sacred spring feeding the river—the Fonte do Agroal—and honored its presiding menhir, in keeping with the local custom of touching the sacred monolith whenever approaching the spring. The stone had stood there since Neolithic times, like so many others in the vicinity, and now it had the Templar logo etched upon its granite face.⁹

What was so special about this ruined church? Sure, it stood on the site of the former Benedictine monastery, and near where Saint Erea was martyred, “her sacred well still inside the monastery, site of many miracles,”¹⁰ but beyond a gesture of respect their actions seem irrational, metaphysical even. Stubbornly, the group commenced no other projects until the church was complete.¹¹ Even the campaign to push the remaining Moors on Portuguese soil back to North Africa was wholly entrusted to Afonso Henriques.

The symbolism in the architecture of this building to which the Templars so devoted themselves reveals the reason for their apparent madness. Dedicated to Mary Magdalene,^*2612 the church emerged as an exercise in purity, humility, and elegant simplicity, as though the architect were a Cistercian. An enormous twelve-pointed rosette dominated the austere Gothic façade, while the crown of the building featured an unusual apse consisting of seven chambers in a fan shape similar to the star emblem of the Egyptian goddess Seshat, the patron of sacred buildings. Inside, the arch leading into the apse featured a smaller yet prominent circular window framing a carved limestone pentagram, the ancient Egyptian symbol of the divine virgin or Isis, but also Sophia, or sophis, the “wisdom” to which esoteric brotherhoods and gnostic sects are so dedicated.

Sheshat and her seven rays.

Santa Maria do Olival, the “mother church of all Templar churches.”

Symbol of Isis inside Santa Maria do Olival.

That this building was of undisclosed importance is an understatement. In time, the church of Santa Maria do Olival would become the pantheon of the Templars, with all twenty-two future Portuguese Masters buried inside.¹³ Interestingly, the biblical Mount Olivet (from which Olival derives its name) has long been prophesied as the place where the dead are brought to life;¹⁴ it is the site where King Solomon first erected a number of altars,¹⁵ not to mention where Jesus was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver, just as thirty silver coins became the token “price of admission” into the Templar Order. It is as though the Templars were making a point, and the humble church they erected became a focal point for a grand design when it was subsequently elected the “mother church of all Templar churches,” including those in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, during the Portuguese period of Discoveries.¹⁶

Tellingly, this was the same title earlier awarded to the Essene church on Mount Sion; by Emperor Hadrian’s time it was already referred to as the “Mother of all churches,” built as it was over the tomb of King David and possibly an even older temple,¹⁷ and the spot upon which Godefroi de Bouillon erected the eight-pillared circular Chamber of Mysteries.

After completing their church, the Templars finally took an interest in the adjacent limestone hill and moved to the next item on the agenda. According to legend, “Master Pais and some monks searched the site where Santa Maria do Olival now stands and found it had been built upon before . . . and launched spears three times, and three times they landed on that site and they agreed to build on that site.”¹⁸ Obviously, no human is capable of launching spears half a mile, let alone make them land three times on the same spot and on top of a hill, and yet the legend is not unusual. Identical stories exist in connection with the founding of sacred sites, one being the masterful English gothic cathedral of Salisbury, whose location was decided by the shot of an arrow from a nearby Neolithic sacred mound (also dedicated to fertility and the divine feminine) an even more preposterous two miles distant.

Paes would not have been familiar with that legend because it was still sixty years in the future, yet to someone inducted into the Mysteries the allegory is all too familiar. In ancient times, prior to erecting a sacred structure, an elite priesthood would be called to assess and locate a hotspot of favorable earth energy, which today would be called geomancy. This practice continued into Greek and Roman times via a priesthood called the College of the Augurs, whose name and purpose is still commemorated in the opening ceremony of important places, the in-augu-ration.¹⁹ In Egypt the process included the act of “piercing the snake.”²⁰ The snake represents the naturally occurring pathways of electromagnetism that flow through and along the Earth like invisible ribbons. This energy is a prerequisite for making the temple function like an electrical circuit, and every sacred site on Earth is located at the intersection of such telluric currents.²¹ However, due to its meandering nature this energy must first be rooted to the spot by a kind of earth acupuncture, and all around the world there exist emblems depicting a god pinning down a serpent with a rod or a serpent wrapped around a tall needlelike stone.

The serpent and the pillar, later known as the caduceus, often depicted with a god.

In medieval times the process acquired imagery recognizable to that period, such as the throwing of a spear or the shooting of an arrow. Gualdino Paes would have been familiar with such symbolism if during his second tour of the Holy Land he followed Bernard de Clairvaux’s instruction to attend the sacred places and understand the spiritual context of the land. Evidence that he did just that comes from a eulogy inscribed on a white marble slab at the behest of Afonso Henriques in honor of his friend:^*27 “Master Galdino blossomed, into a true noble, native of Braga, during the reign of the illustrious king of Portugal, abandoned the secular military, and shone as a bright star, because having become a knight of the Temple, he journeyed to Jerusalem and during five years did not put down his arms nor rested; together with the Master and his brothers he engaged in battle with the king of Egypt and Syria. After five years he returned to the one who educated and trained him a knight.”

So, this knight not only “abandoned the secular military,” he also “shone as a bright star”—not like a bright star but as one. This subtlety may seem trivial, but to anyone familiar with Egyptian mysticism the implications are immense.

A central component for initiates of the ancient Mysteries schools was a ritual in which the soul is awakened and the individual no longer associates solely with material forces. It would follow several years of observation of the candidate and instruction in esoteric arts. The metaphor associated with this rite is “raising the dead,” whereupon the initiate becomes “as a star.”²² Paes spent five years in the Holy Land, long enough to come into contact with its sacred places, their spiritual practices, and the various esoteric sects teaching them, so it is highly likely he was indoctrinated into the sacred arts. If so, he followed in the footsteps of Count Dom Henrique, for he too “venerated the Sacred Places” and was entrusted with holy relics in Jerusalem.²³ Certainly, upon his return from the Holy Land, Gualdino came armed only with the hand of Saint Gregory the Nazarene, which he later placed in the church he and the Templars dedicated a whole year to rebuild in Thamar, where its flesh remains “without corruption, just like his body in Rome, without corruption.”²⁴

Interior of the church at Olival.

In a metaphysical twist, the Templars’ behavior in Thamar takes on a patina of ancient ritual.

Not only does the Templar Master appear to have been initiated into the Mysteries, he may even have excelled as a “master of the craft,” because the three spears Gualdino figuratively launched correspond to the graphic mark carved by the master mason on the keystone of sacred buildings. This symbol at once resembles three spears or the three rays synonymous with the descent of the Holy Spirit. Such a mark exists on a keystone on the promontory above Thamar. Its date of March 1, 1160, marks the inauguration of a striking round church strangely reminiscent of the one in Jerusalem by the name of Holy Sepulcher.