52

PRESENT ERA. TOMAR. STARING AT THE ROTUNDA . . .

The Templars may have once deposited something of great spiritual importance in Tomar after all, something associated with the Ark of the Covenant or its contents. And just like the cryptic phrase carved beside the image of the Ark on the Door of Initiates in Chartres cathedral, its exact location in Tomar, like its nature, remains elusive, while its inviolable halo has been kept alive by way of a folk tradition.

What struck me most about Francisco Alvarez’s eyewitness account from Ethiopia is not so much the record of advanced construction techniques the Templars employed in their churches in Ethiopia—which no modern expert has solved, by the way—but the description of the labyrinth of tunnels, crypts, and galleries connected to the churches and used for religious purposes, all of which seamlessly resonates with the Regaleira estate in Sintra, already a sacred place by the time Master Gualdino Paes inherited it on behalf of the Templars.

Perhaps Sintra’s maze of tunnels and the two mysterious shafts are an imprint of methods the Templars learned abroad, possibly implemented by the Templar Master based on knowledge and experiences acquired during his years of preparation in the Holy Land.

Like the secrets of the Mysteries, the absolute truth remains obscured by veils.

As for the actual secrets for “raising the dead,” that “law so extraordinary on which such a secret should be kept,” they too remain occulted (hidden from the eye), appearing here and there in ripples and echoes like a benevolent ghost. What is certain is that, in the end, the Templars were protecting the pilgrim trail after all. Not in its literal sense but in the manner in which they guarded the path for every inquiring journeyman wishing to come into contact with the Mysteries, the path to personal revelation that opens a metaphorical door to the kingdom of heaven.

To paradise.