48

PRESENT ERA. APRIL. IN THE SHADOW OF A STATUE IN TOMAR . . .

By now, I was confident that the Knights Templar, in cooperation with the Cistercians and the Ordre de Sion, had pursued two primary objectives in Portugal. The first was the creation of an independent nation-state, which, once achieved, allowed for the development of a kingdom within a kingdom, a temporal New Jerusalem; the second was the practice of the Mysteries, particularly the ritual of “raising the dead,” promulgated by an inner brotherhood from knowledge obtained under Temple Mount, thanks in part to the decoding of texts by learned individuals in Flanders and Champagne.

There are, in addition, insinuations of the preservation of a holy bloodline, the most blatant evidence being the oath sworn by every new Templar Master and Procurator in Portugal, who each vowed “to protect the bloodline of David.”¹

Right from the very beginning the quest undertaken by Godefroi de Bouillon, Hugues de Payns, Count Dom Henrique, Bernard de Clairvaux, and their supporting cast inevitably leads to the same conclusion: the improvement of the human condition. Their guide was knowledge of a revelatory nature that fashions the individual into a metaphorical vessel of gold. As the ancient Egyptians describe it, once the individual becomes a suitable receptacle for this knowledge, he or she imbibes the knowledge and becomes the knowledge. Many cultures throughout the world speak of this process of self-empowerment, how such information is timeless, transmitted long ago by a god or an individual of godly stature, the words inscribed on special icons or sacred stones and housed in suitable vessels or temples.

Ages may change, but basic human traits do not. No person involved with such a quest could possibly have resisted the temptation to seek out its source material, especially since wondrous things came to those who interact with it. To quote a Templar initiate, it led them “to experience the joys of Paradise.”

Admittedly, I had by now become equally as curious, and although my original purpose never intended to raise controversial subjects such as the Graal or the Ark, by merely stroking the Templar urn one resuscitates them by default. In any event, I came to understand that in 1210 the Graal legends were compiled into one work titled The Vulgate Cycle, most likely by Cistercian monks.² In one of its five sections—the Queste del Saint Graal—an intriguing dimension is added to the legend when the quest is completed by Galahad, a virgin knight destined from birth to achieve it.

The parallel to the gilded path of Gualdino Paes is here inescapable. While one chronicler claims this knight was a Templar Master right from the beginning—although unlikely—if the claim is taken figuratively the implication is that Paes was destined, like Galahad, to undertake the quest from a very young age, which in Gualdino’s case might have begun as an infant, for when he returned from Jerusalem with Arnaldo da Rocha and three other Templar Procurators in the winter of 1125, he was barely eight years old.

In light of the donation of Sintra to Gualdino, and the esoteric discoveries made there, I could not help but wonder to what degree the aspects of both the Graal and the Ark of the Covenant were played out in Portugal, especially given Afonso Henriques’s cryptic seal on the charter of Ceras, the property that Master Gualdino and the Templars put to good use by creating an Elysian oasis in Tomar, the focal point being its enigmatic rotunda.

The Ark and the Graal share similar characteristics, especially in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s later and more complete story. They are both receptacles, they serve as oracles, they offer information, to the pure of heart they are light in weight but to others become unbearably heavy, they are stones that fell from heaven, they emit a dazzling radiance, they produce fertility or a cornucopia of abundance, they are associated with a salver or tray, they are made of gold, and they are symbolized by the emblem of the dove. It can be argued, then, that to search for the Ark—or what was deposited inside it—is to pursue the Graal.

Tradition describes how the Ark was secreted away from the Temple of Solomon by Menelik, son of the Ethiopian queen of Sheba and King Solomon,^*47 shortly before a Babylonian army razed the building to the ground.³ Menelik is said to have transported it to Ethiopia by way of the river Nile, and he afterward became that kingdom’s first Jewish emperor. Research into the physical whereabouts of the Ark was carried out in the 1990s, leading to a thoroughly convincing argument for its present resting place to be the unassuming church of Our Lady Mary of Sion in the town of Aksum.^†74 Simple logic dictates, therefore, that if the precious object is in Ethiopia, then it cannot be in Portugal as well.

Nor had I expected it to be. But an aspect of the Ark, now that is another story. If, like the Graal, the concept of the Ark depends very much on how it is interpreted, there is no reason why information once deposited in this container—scrolls, sacred geometry, rituals, and so forth—should not have been applied in Tomar by Gualdino Paes, especially if a million man Arab army came all the way from southern Spain to remove it from him.

This much was running through my mind as I found shade beneath the focal point in Tomar’s central plaza, a bronze statue of Gualdino Paes, his right hand firmly clutching a scroll as though its sculptor wished to convey a message.

Every four years, the plaza itself becomes the focus of an old tradition, the Feast of Tabuleiros. In a long procession, men and women parade side by side through the town, each woman balancing on her head a decorated tabuleiro to which is attached an unfeasibly tall vertical shaft bearing thirty loaves of bread. The structures are crowned either with a dove or an armillary sphere. The feast is unique to Tomar and has been enacted since at least the reign of Dom Dinis, a thirteenth-century Portuguese king and Templar protector,⁵ and up until 1895, it was celebrated on or close to the feast day of John the Baptist.

Such folk festivals reveal a lot about the history of a place, for they often commemorate a truth or an event of sufficient importance as to be maintained in the local consciousness long after the event itself. What struck me about this one was its blatant Templar roots and symbolism: thirty loaves of bread, synonymous with the thirty pieces of silver for which Jesus’s—and by implication John the Baptist’s—lineage was betrayed, later to become the symbolic entry fee into the Templar Order itself; the armillary sphere, an emblem unique to the maritime discoveries of the Order of the Temple in Portugal; and the dove, representing the holy spirit, an important symbol in the Graal story of Parzival, in which a secretive and spiritual group within the Templars, symbolized by this bird, protect the Graal and a castle on a hill, much like the one on top of the hill behind me protects the rotunda.

Incidentally, the seal of the Ordre de Sion also depicts a dove.

Perhaps I was starting to read too much into what may be nothing more than an innocent feast honoring the summer solstice, but then why perform it every fourth year when the solstice is a yearly event? I also could not help but take note of the disproportionately tall tabuleiros balanced precariously on the women’s heads and how the combination bears an uncanny resemblance to the unusually extended crown of twin tablets worn by Amun, the Egyptian god who once handed the knowledge of heaven to the god of wisdom, Djehuti.

The seal of the Ordre de Sion.

The Portuguese word tabuleiro means “tray,” and the feast shares many similarities with the Ethiopian feast of Timbuk, a celebration practiced since the time when Menelik placed the Ark in the church of Our Lady Mary of Sion. During Timbuk the priests balance on their heads a tray called a tabotat, and that word shares the same etymological root as tabuleiro.

How did Ethiopia come to be in Portugal?