The Knights of the Temple
A case could probably be made that monasticism was the most important cultural and religious innovation to come out of the revolt against the old gods of nature. Across much of Eurasia, certainly, the history of cultures and ideas alike was profoundly shaped by the rise of monasteries and nunneries as important religious institutions. In Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and a great many smaller religious movements that arose in the wake of the great religious revolution, monks and nuns living in self-supporting rural enclaves became the custodians of any number of texts and traditions that would otherwise have been lost forever. The Christian monks who painstakingly copied surviving works of Greek and Roman literature by hand had exact equivalents wherever monasticism spread.
Monasteries in the Christian west and elsewhere also tended toward a decentralized style of governance that provided ample room for diversity in thought and practice. In western Europe in the Middle Ages, for example, there were many different orders of monks and nuns, each living under its own distinctive monastic rule and celebrating the rites of the church in its own idiosyncratic ways. Most monastic orders maintained a prickly independence from the authority of local bishops, and even the Pope could not always expect obedience from powerful abbots. That independence made it possible for a great many new and old traditions to spread through monastic channels.
Agriculture was a particular focus of monastic innovation, as most monasteries raised at least part of the food that the monks ate. Even in the later Middle Ages when monks in most Christian orders rarely worked in the fields, monastic landholdings were still working farms staffed by lay brothers drawn from the local peasantry. It’s not accidental that Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries played important roles in introducing such innovations as crop rotation to medieval agriculture, nor is it likely accidental that many of the variations in church architecture that brought it into line with the temple tradition elsewhere appeared in churches connected to monasteries before they found their way into cathedrals and churches meant for the general public—the Irish round towers were among the first examples of this, but they were far from the last. Furthermore, certain lines of evidence suggest that a form of the temple technology endured in at least one English monastery until the end of the Middle Ages.
The Glastonbury Secret
“The Abbey will one day be repaired and rebuilt for the like worship which has now ceased, and then peace and plenty will for a long time abound.”175 These were the final words of Austin Ringwode, the last survivor of the monks who were driven out of Glastonbury Abbey when it was seized and sold off by the English government in 1539. What exactly was the “worship that has now ceased” is a hard question to answer at first glance because the daily offices and other liturgies of the English church in Henry VIII’s time were still being celebrated at cathedrals and large churches all over England long after Glastonbury and England’s other monasteries were seized and desecrated.
Whether or not the first church at Glastonbury was actually founded by Joseph of Arimathea, as a persistent legend claims, a Christian presence there goes back far into the Dark Ages. The first well-documented structure there, a stone church of Saints. Peter and Paul built about the year 725 by Ine, the Saxon king of Wessex, replaced an earlier wooden structure of unknown date. Traditions from the early Middle Ages connected the abbey with the legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail.
Those connections included the kind of evidence medieval minds favored most, the relics of the blessed dead. In 1191, during excavations following a disastrous fire, the monks of Glastonbury claimed to have found the grave of Arthur himself, and while this may have been partly a stunt to attract pilgrims and their donations to pay for the rebuilding, many contemporary scholars have argued that the details mentioned in accounts in monastic chronicles only make sense if the monks actually did discover an ancient grave where and when they claimed. A link between the historical Arthur and Glastonbury has been defended on grounds convincing to modern scholarship by Geoffrey Ashe among others.176
The most important link between Glastonbury and the temple tradition, though, is found in its links with the Grail legend. Those are extensive enough that entire books have been written on the subject, and the earliest of them is actually a Grail romance—the Perlesvaus or High Book of the Grail, one of the first Grail stories to be written in prose rather than verse, which was written in the early decades of the thirteenth century.177 The unknown author of Perlesvaus was intimately familiar with Glastonbury and the surrounding landscape, and places much of the Grail story in that setting.
Plenty of medieval folklore made the same geographical connection, not least in Glastonbury itself. It’s probably not accidental, for instance, that one old thoroughfare in Glastonbury is named Chilkwell Street, the rounded-off modern form of its medieval name Chalice Well Street, after the well where the Grail was traditionally hidden. In the same way, the bridge leading to the nearby town of Street still has the name Pomparles Bridge; “Pomparles” is another rounding off, this time from the medieval Latin Pons Perilis, the Bridge of Peril, across which Arthur’s knights were said to have ridden on their way to seek the Grail. If the Grail legends were a medieval way of talking about the temple tradition, as suggested in Chapter Five, this is at least suggestive.
Something more significant than a royal corpse or an enigmatic story may once have been present at Glastonbury, though. This is the purport of a brief but intriguing passage in The Antiquities of the Church of Glastonbury by William of Malmesbury, a monk who spent several years at the abbey studying its records in the early twelfth century. Speaking of the church of St. Mary, the oldest surviving structure in the abbey, he writes:
One can observe there upon the paving, in the forms of triangles and squares, stones carefully interlaced and sealed with lead. If I believe that some sacred mystery is concealed under them, I do no harm to religion.178
Modern researchers have speculated that the “stones carefully interlaced and sealed with lead” may have traced out some pattern of sacred geometry. This is certainly possible, but a more prosaic possibility is that the stones and lead may have sealed the entrance to an underground vault. If there was such a vault, it was removed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, only a few decades before the destruction of the abbey. At that time, the floor of what had originally been the church of St. Mary, and had become the Lady Chapel of the abbey church, was torn up and a new crypt excavated beneath it.
Buried vaults play such a large role in the mythology surrounding the temple tradition that it’s not surprising to find such claims at Glastonbury as well. Rumors of an underground vault somewhere on the abbey grounds containing the abbey’s most secret treasures have been circulating since the sixteenth century. These rumors may have been more than wishful thinking—that, at least, is suggested by the fate of the last abbot of Glastonbury.
When the abbey was seized and desecrated by the agents of Henry VIII in 1539, Abbot Richard Whiting and his two chief subordinates were accused of hiding the abbey’s most important treasures, dragged up to the top of Glastonbury Tor, and hanged, drawn and quartered for their supposed crime. There were more than eight hundred monasteries, nunneries, and friaries in Britain when the dissolutions began in 1536, and only a few of their leaders suffered any punishment at all—much less one as barbarous as Whiting’s. When the floor of the church of St. Mary was removed and a new crypt excavated beneath it, was whatever lay hidden under those stones sealed with lead moved to a new and more secret location? The possibility deserves more attention than it has received from mainstream scholarship.
None of this proves that Glastonbury Abbey was still in possession of the secret temple technology until its destruction. With Glastonbury, as with so many other things that may have been connected to the temple tradition, all that remains is an assortment of riddles, hints, and enigmatic remains. The traditional connection between the abbey and the Arthurian legend has focused more attention on Glastonbury than on most other monastic establishments and brought out certain puzzling details; it may be that the same sort of attention directed to other ancient monasteries might turn up similar examples elsewhere.
Of all the monastic orders of medieval Europe, though, one seems to have played a role in the transmission and development of the temple tradition that was more important than any other. The order in question was not noted for its scholarship, or for that matter its sanctity. For the last seven centuries, in fact, its name has been surrounded by a cloud of speculation and scandal. From its mysterious origins to its terrible fate, it followed a trajectory all its own, and in the process, became the link connecting the Temple of Solomon with the lost secrets of Freemasonry. That order was, of course, the Knights Templar.
The Knights of the Temple
The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to give the Templars the dignity of their official title, has been the focus of an immense amount of scholarship and an even larger mass of speculation over the last three centuries. The scholarship is justified by the great importance of the Templars as shock troops of the Crusades, a major force in medieval politics, an equally important factor in the transmission of Arabic knowledge to Europe, and the founders of the first European system of banking, among many other things. The speculation, though, is equally justified. From the mysteries surrounding the Order’s foundation to the unanswered questions surrounding its gory end, the Templars are wrapped in enigmas.
Despite the uncertainties, missing pieces, and conflicting information from sources, an account of the order’s history that is more or less accepted by modern scholars can be assembled, and it runs more or less as follows.179 In 1096, infuriated by the refusal of Muslim authorities in the Middle East to allow Christian pilgrims to visit shrines in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, an army of European knights and soldiers set out for the Holy Land on the First Crusade under the leadership of the French nobleman Godfrey de Bouillon. After a great deal of fighting, they conquered Jerusalem in 1099 and established a series of Christian kingdoms in parts of what are now the nations of Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. It was in the aftermath of the First Crusade and in response to continued fighting between the Crusaders and their Muslim enemies that the Order of the Temple was born.
In 1118 nine French knights who had remained in the Holy Land presented themselves before Warmund de Picquigny, Patriarch of Jerusalem, seeking to become monks of a kind that the Western world had never before seen: warriors bound by a monastic rule, combining the discipline of the monastery with that of the battlefield. Their request was granted, and they were assigned quarters on the site of the Temple of Solomon. Their official mission was to protect pilgrims against Muslim raiders on the dangerous trip from the ports on the Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem and back.
For the first nine years of Templar history, the order consisted only of these nine knights, and how much help so small a number might have been to pilgrims on the Judean roads is an open question. Funds were so short that at times two Templars had to ride a single horse. A number of modern researchers, however, have suggested that the nine knights spent these years digging tunnels into the Temple Mount, and in the year 1126 made an important discovery of some sort. Certain traditions of the high degrees of Masonry, cited in Chapter One of this book, doubtless underlie these claims. As we’ll see in the next chapter, though, there is at least one very good reason to think that a remarkable reality might lie behind these rumors.
In 1127 the leader of the little group, Hugh de Payens, sailed home to France and made contact with Bernard of Clairvaux, the nephew of one of the other nine original Templars, who was well on his way to becoming the most famous monastic reformer of the age. With Bernard’s energetic assistance, a church council was held at Troyes in 1128, granting the Templars official recognition and a monastic rule specially designed for their needs.
Immediately afterward, noble families from across western Europe vied with each other to donate lands and other assets to the order, and scores of new members sought admission. What had been a small and poorly funded community that deserved its title of “poor knights” became, with astonishing speed, one of the largest and wealthiest religious orders in Christendom. No other monastic order in history has ever grown so fast or acquired wealth and influence so quickly—a detail that has driven plenty of speculation about just what it was that the Templars might have discovered deep within the Temple Mount.
The order’s future secured, Hugh returned to the Holy Land, and the Templars began an extraordinarily ambitious construction campaign, building six massive castles at strategic points to defend the Kingdom of Jerusalem and staffing them with newly initiated knights and men-at-arms. Along with the castles, the Templar order obtained substantial tracts of real estate in the Holy Land, large enough that the order had to hire a great many native people to help run, cultivate, and guard their estates; the order had an officer called the Turcopolier whose job was to manage these native auxiliaries. All this required the Templar order to expand its membership to include not only knights but foot soldiers, light cavalry, engineers, masons, and practitioners of many other necessary crafts.
From that point until the final downfall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Templars were among the most important military forces defending the European bridgehead in the Middle East. Meanwhile, back in Europe, the Templar order turned the immense gifts donated to it into a thriving network of landholdings that served to funnel a steady stream of wealth to the Holy Land. Arabic building methods learned by Templar builders in the Holy Land and brought back home helped spark a revolution in European architecture, leading to the rise of the Gothic style of the high Middle Ages.
The example of the Templars quickly inspired imitation. The Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, originally founded as an ordinary monastic order providing shelter and medical care to Christian pilgrims, reformulated itself shortly after 1128 along Templar lines as the Knights Hospitaller and provided another body of trained, dedicated fighting men to the defense of the Crusader states. Later, in 1190, a third order—the Teutonic Knights of the Hospital of St. Mary at Jerusalem, founded by German knights uncomfortable with the Francocentric culture of the existing knightly orders—joined the Templars and Hospitallers in the defense of the Crusader states.
The Templars, however, were always the most important of the military orders. They had the largest and wealthiest support infrastructure of estates and priories back in Europe, and the arrangements they made to funnel income to the fighting in the east and provide safe storage of assets for Crusaders made them the first international banking system Europe had ever known. Every time you sign, cash, or deposit a check, you’re using a technique for money transfer that the Knights Templar invented.
All their efforts, however, could not keep the Kingdom of Jerusalem secure in the face of a steady stream of Muslim counterattacks. In 1187, just eighty-eight years after it was captured by the Crusaders, Jerusalem was retaken by the armies of the great Arab commander Saladin. The Crusaders regrouped and fought on, but it was a losing struggle. When the last Crusader enclave in the Holy Land fell to the Muslims in 1291, the Templars kept fighting, striking from naval bases in Cyprus while calling on the kingdoms of Europe to join them in launching another Crusade. What happened instead was the stuff of legend.
At dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, officers of the French government carried out coordinated raids across France and arrested every Knight Templar they could find, including the Order’s Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. The charge was heresy. Later that month, Pope Clement II ordered every king in the Christian world to arrest the Templars in their dominions. Not all obeyed, but by the end of the year most Templar knights were in custody.
Trials followed. More than a hundred Templar knights, after savage torture, confessed to the charges. Those who recanted their confessions after the torture ended were promptly burnt at the stake as relapsed heretics. Jurisdictional squabbles between King Philip IV of France and the Pope dragged out the proceedings. In 1311, at the Council of Vienne, Clement formally dissolved the Order, and in 1314, Jacques de Molay was burnt at the stake in Paris.
It’s a common misconception that all the Templars were put to death for their supposed crimes. In fact, most of the Templars who had been in France, and essentially all those in other countries, survived the trials and were allowed to join other knightly or monastic orders. The king of Portugal created a new order, the Knights of Christ, for the Templars in his dominions, while Templars east of the Rhine were welcomed into the Teutonic Knights. All across Europe, ordinary monastic orders also accepted a great many former Templars into their monasteries. To all appearances, that was the end of the Knights Templar.
The Templar Secret
The consensus of modern historians is that the destruction of the Templars was motivated purely by the greed and ambition of Philip IV, king of France, and that the accusations of heresy were a cynical exercise in royal propaganda—in the words of historian Malcolm Lambert, “a farrago of nonsense”180 meant to provide a legal excuse for the theft of the Order’s immense wealth. Certainly there’s good reason to think that the Templars’ wealth had a very large role in motivating Philip’s actions, and he and his courtiers had used accusations of heresy more than once to target enemies for destruction. Still, the fact that an accusation has dubious motives does not by itself show that the charges are wholly unfounded.
The charges brought against the Order amounted to no fewer than 104 articles. Many of the accusations were lifted wholesale from old books on heresies of the past, a common practice in heresy trials then and thereafter. Thus the Templars were accused of denying Christ, spitting on the Cross, meeting secretly at night, practicing homosexuality, worshipping a cat, and being required to kiss the anus of the presiding officer during the ceremony of initiation; these were all standard canards directed toward heretics by Catholic propagandists of that era.
These overfamiliar charges did not stand alone, though. The Templars were also accused of worshipping an idol named Baphomet, which was shaped like a bearded human head, and of believing that worshipping this idol caused flowers and trees to grow. Each Templar was said to wear a cord around his waist that had been wrapped around the idol. Templar priests, according to the charges, spoke something other than the usual words of consecration during the Mass; Templars were only allowed to confess their sins to members of the Order, and Templar officials who had not taken priestly vows claimed to be able to absolve Templars from sins they had committed, a power the Church only granted to ordained priests.
These accusations don’t merely copy the standard propaganda of the time. Rather, they reflect the actual practice of dissident sects of Christianity in medieval Europe, many of which had their own clergy that claimed the same rights as Rome’s, understood and celebrated the sacraments in unorthodox ways, and had sacred images and relics of their own, which orthodox thinkers inevitably dismissed as idols.
The name of the Order’s supposed idol, Baphomet, offers an intriguing clue to the nature of the beliefs the Templars may have brought back to Europe from the Holy Land. Historian of religions Hugh Schonfield has pointed out that a simple mode of secret writing in common use in the Middle Ages makes unexpected sense of the idol’s name.181 This is the so-called Atbash cipher, which replaces the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph, with the last, Tau; the second, Beth, with the next to last, Shin, and so on. The name of the cipher comes from these same letters—
(Aleph, Tau, Beth, Shin) spells Atbash in Hebrew.
In the Hebrew alphabet, Baphomet is spelled 
(Beth, Peh, Vau, Mem, Tau). Treat that series of letters as a message in the Atbash cipher, and it becomes 
(Shin, Vau, Peh, Yod, Aleph). This is the Hebrew spelling of Sophia, Wisdom, the name of the central figure in many versions of Gnostic Christianity.
The Gnostics were a complex and poorly understood movement that emerged in the Roman Empire and combined elements of Christian and Pagan tradition to pursue a diverse series of spiritual quests united only by a common faith in personal experience—in Greek, gno¯sis—of spiritual realities. It’s a mistake, though one that has very often been made, to see Gnosticism as an anti-Christian religion, or for that matter as a single religion at all. All through its history, Gnosticism has been a diffuse movement consisting of many diverse traditions. Far from rejecting Christianity, furthermore, most historically attested Gnostic teachings claim to be the true Christian religion, and many Gnostics have seen the Christian orthodoxy of their time as a corrupt and blasphemous counterfeit of true Christianity—roughly, that is, the way that the defenders of Christian orthodoxy have generally viewed Gnosticism.
The raw diversity of the Gnostic movement has too rarely been recognized by scholars who lack familiarity with surviving Gnostic scriptures and texts. The sole theme common to them all, the characteristic that gave the movement its name, was the belief that personal experience of the spiritual realm, rather than faith in doctrinal formulas, was the key to salvation. Thus it simply isn’t true, for example, that all Gnostic teachings reject the physical body and the material universe as the evil creations of a wicked antigod. That was the theme of one broad current of Gnostic speculation, and the fact that texts from that end of the Gnostic spectrum were very well represented in the Nag Hammadi collection of Gnostic scriptures from Egypt has misled quite a few people, including scholars who should have known better, into thinking that all Gnosticism shares that emphasis.
On the other end of the Gnostic spectrum was a current of thought that affirmed the living presence of the divine in nature, to the extent of making use of Pagan fertility myths and rituals in their teachings. In ancient times, this aspect of the Gnostic movement was exemplified by a sect known as the Naassenes.182 Most of the little that is known about this sect comes from the writings of Hippolytus, one of the most tireless and vitriolic heresy-hunters among the fathers of the Catholic Church, who cites most of a Naassene document in the course of his denunciations.
Among the things that set the Naassene sect apart from many other branches of the Gnostic movement was its enthusiastic adoption of the language and symbolism of the ancient Greek Mysteries and the participation of its members in the Pagan celebrations of those Mysteries. There are, according to the document quoted by Hippolytus, two aspects to the Pagan Mysteries, a lesser aspect and a greater one; the lesser aspect is that of “fleshly generation,” that is, agricultural fertility and human reproduction, while the greater aspect is that of the heavenly mysteries of spiritual initiation. Beyond these two gates of the Mysteries, said the Naassenes, stands a third gate, which is the Gnosis of Christ: “And of all men we alone are Christians, accomplishing the mystery at the Third Gate.”183
The possibility that the Templars may have embraced one of the Gnostic alternatives to mainstream Christianity has been suggested repeatedly over the last few centuries and just as repeatedly rejected.184 It has not often been realized, though, that if the Templars revered a sacred image in the Pagan fashion, believing that the spiritual power the image represented made the flowers and trees grow, they were following a well-established Gnostic precedent.
What is more, the fusion of alternative religious views and magical practices with agriculture was well established in the Holy Land and elsewhere long before the nine founders of the Order of the Temple arrived in Jerusalem. It’s an interesting fact that manuals of magic and heretical religion in circulation in the Middle East in the early Middle Ages were crammed with agricultural advice, some of it remarkably practical.185 While nothing directly connected to the temple tradition appears in the few surviving examples of this literature, the connection between alternative spirituality and agriculture was certainly present in the minds of people in the Middle East before, during, and after the years when the Templars ruled there.
Then as now, a galaxy of small religious communities of various kinds lived in various corners of the Middle East, and their members—many of them unsympathetic to the Muslim cause after centuries of persecution—would have been prized recruits for the Templars’ native auxiliary corps. Among the surviving minority faiths of the Middle East today are several, such as the Mandeans of southern Iraq, that can trace their descent to the ancient Gnostics, and other such groups such as the Sabaeans are known to have become extinct since the time of the Templars. It is thus at least possible, given the evidence surveyed above, that it was through contact with such a group in the Holy Land that the Templars came to embrace a Gnostic Christianity of something like the Naassene type as the true teaching of Christ.
We may, however, have another source of information about the tradition that the Templars adopted, though it comes by a roundabout route. This is a body of legends about a sacred item as mysterious as the Templar’s supposed idol Baphomet, which shared with that rumored object the same connections with knighthood and secrecy and the same power of causing flowers and trees to grow. Those legends are, of course, the medieval narratives about the Holy Grail.
The Quest of the Grail
Exactly why a set of folktales about a long-dead warlord in post-Roman Britain happened to turn into one of the main symbolic channels for the temple tradition is a complicated question, and very possibly one that will never be settled with any kind of certainty. Historians chasing the origins of the medieval legends of King Arthur have traced them to itinerant story-
tellers from Brittany, who took their traditional tales to France and other corners of Europe and found eager audiences there. Brittany also produced some of the toughest mercenary soldiers in Europe; the army William the Conqueror led to the conquest of England in 1066 included many Breton knights and men-at-arms, and a very large Breton contingent also joined the First Crusade on its long journey to Jerusalem.
These Breton Crusaders brought their stories with them. The Porta della Pescheria of the cathedral of Modena in Italy was built in the early years of the twelfth century, and its archivolt features a carving of “Artus de Bretani” and his knights “Che” and “Galvagnus”—in modern terms, King Arthur, Kay, and Gawain—storming a castle; they wear knee-length coats of mail and conical helmets, like the Norman knights in the Bayeux Tapestry.186 Modena is close to Bari, one of the main staging areas for the First Crusade, where contingents of Breton warriors spent the winter of 1096–7 preparing for the invasion of the Holy Land.
An interesting detail helps link the Grail legends to the Crusades—the word “grail” itself. As noted earlier, it’s a medieval French word for an expensive dish or platter, but it was not much used in the northern French regions where Chrétien de Troyes’s patron Count Philip of Flanders had his home, and not much more common in central France, where Chrétien was born and raised. Before Chrétien’s poem made the word famous, it was mostly used in Provence, on France’s Mediterranean coast, and across the Pyrenees in Catalonia and Aragon. Still, there was one other place where the word was common, and it remained a common term there even after it dropped from common use elsewhere: the Crusader kingdoms of the Holy Land.187
The connection with the Crusades is of considerable importance because similar points of contact run all through the aspect of Arthurian legend that bears most directly on the theme of this book: the legend of the Holy Grail. As already mentioned, most modern scholars tend to support one of two theories for the origin of the Grail legend—the theory of Celtic origins on the one hand and the theory of Christian origins on the other—while a minority has pointed out that medieval storytellers were perfectly capable of combining material from both these sources, and others as well, into a single narrative.
According to Chrétien de Troyes, however, the raw material for the Conte del Graal came from a book given to him by Count Philip of Flanders.188 Scholars have argued at length about whether the book existed or not, and proposed any number of speculations about the contents of the book, but the man from whom Chrétien claimed to have received it has received a good deal less attention.189
This is all the more curious because Count Philip of Flanders was not a minor figure in twelfth-century Europe. His life and activities are well known, and they point in directions that will be familiar already to readers of this book. His father Thierry was a famous Crusader who went to fight in the Holy Land four times; his mother Sibylla was the daughter of Fulk of Anjou, King of Jerusalem; Philip himself followed the family tradition, went on Crusade three times, and died in the Holy Land in 1191 during the last of these adventures. Like all the leaders of the Crusades, Philip was in constant contact with the Knights Templar in the Holy Land and also at home in Flanders and northern France—the Templars had extensive holdings in and around Philip’s domain and close connections with most of the noble families in the region.190
Philip’s crusading tendencies also tended in another direction: against the Cathar movement. This was a medieval Gnostic sect that emerged in southern France and northern Italy in the twelfth century. By their opponents, they were also called Albigensians—literally “the people from Albi”—because the town of Albi in southern France was one of their first important centers. They drew their doctrines from the end of the Gnostic spectrum that considered the natural world to be the creations of an evil god, and they rejected the Catholic Church and its sacraments as creations of the powers of evil. The Catholic Church heartily returned the favor, and turned out to have more swords on its side; in a series of violent persecutions that lasted most of the thirteenth century, the Cathars were annihilated by the Pope’s armies and inquisitors, and only scraps remain of their teachings and traditions.
What makes this history relevant to the theme of this book is that Philip of Flanders was a bitter enemy of the Cathars even before the Catholic Church formally denounced the movement in 1190. This has usually been taken as proof that Philip was strictly orthodox in his beliefs. It could mean that, to be sure, but those of my readers who have watched controversies between small religious sects or old-fashioned Marxist political parties know that the fiercest opponents of one alternative belief system usually come from another alternative belief system, not from the mainstream.
As already noted, the Cathars rejected the natural world and the validity of the Catholic sacraments. The teaching that the Templars seem to have embraced came from the other Naassene end of the spectrum, and the teachings affirmed the validity of the Catholic sacraments as useful first steps on the way to gnosis. Hostility between two such diverse belief systems would be hard to avoid, and only the bad habit of assuming that all Gnostic teachings must amount to the same thing and be on the same side of every conflict has obscured that factor.
It’s in this light that Wolfram von Eschenbach’s riddling name for the Grail can best be understood. Lapsit exillis, as we’ve seen, works out to “he, she, or it fell from among them.” In the vast majority of Gnostic teachings, that sentence applies precisely to one and only one figure: Sophia, the spirit of wisdom, who fell from among the Aeons—the timeless, perfect powers of the Gnostic world of light—into our world of generation and decay. The fall and redemption of Sophia plays a central role in most Gnostic mythology, and it’s remarkable, to use no stronger word, that Wolfram’s term for the Grail and the name of the Templar’s supposed idol work out to the same name for the same core Gnostic figure.
Chrétien’s Conte del Graal was composed, according to most scholars, in or around the year 1190. Those were tumultuous years in western Europe and the Crusader states alike. In 1187 Saladin crushed the Crusader armies at the battle of the Horns of Hattin and conquered Jerusalem. In 1189, in response, the Third Crusade got under way. In 1190 Pope Alexander II declared the Albigensians anathema, setting the stage for the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade nineteen years later. In 1191 the Knights Templar established a new headquarters in the Holy Land at Acre, on the shores of the Mediterranean, and began the occupation of the island of Cyprus as a potential base of operations if Acre fell. In that same year, 1191, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey announced their discovery of the lost grave of King Arthur.
If the long-rumored Templar discoveries in the Holy Land included, among other things, a body of information relating to the temple tradition, 1190 was a good time for that information to be put in circulation in western Europe in a new, covert form. The fall of Jerusalem must have made it clear to everyone involved that divine providence could not be counted on to defend the Crusader states from their Muslim enemies, and the reorientation of Templar activities to Cyprus shows that the Knights of the Temple, at least, were preparing for the possibility that the Holy Land might be lost completely. At the same time, the hardening of attitudes toward the Cathars must have provided a stark warning to the custodians of the secret temple technology that practices and teachings that strayed too close to the borders of heresy might have lethal consequences for anyone caught participating in them.
The invention of the Grail legends was a masterly response to that predicament. Drawing on the already rich medieval heritage of allegory and typological thinking, it allowed the core of the tradition to be transmitted in a form that looked perfectly innocent, except to those who happened to have the key to its interpretation. The legends could even say in so many words that there was a profound and terrible secret associated with the Grail, and those who weren’t in on the secret would just treat that as a narrative device and nothing more.
It’s entirely possible that the idea of weaving the temple tradition into a legendary tale—and into the specific set of tales about King Arthur, for that matter—had deeper roots as well. The Bretons in the First Crusade whose propensities for telling stories left lasting traces in the carvings of Modena Cathedral could well have brought scraps of the temple tradition in its Celtic Christian form with them; all it would have taken is one Breton monk or priest who knew enough of the traditional lore to grasp the connection that linked those teachings with the Templar discoveries. Whether anyone in the early twelfth century recognized the remnants of older versions of the same tradition in Celtic folklore is another question, and it is almost impossible to settle with the information we now have, but the possibility is there.
Not all of those who spread the story of the Grail were necessarily aware of the message it concealed. Jessie Weston, who arguably came closer to the Grail’s secret than anyone else in recent times, was convinced that Chrétien de Troyes had no notion of the inner meaning of the story he was embroidering, but simply thought of it as a lively romance of the sort he had already reworked successfully in the past.191 Others, in particular the anonymous author of The Elucidation, seem to have been much better informed. There were still others, finally, such as the equally anonymous authors of the Perlesvaus and the Prose Lancelot, who were apparently aware of the existence of the Grail secret, and even of its nature, and deliberately rewrote the story to replace the fertility symbolism with orthodox Christian theology. These last were harbingers of the final phase in the history of the temple tradition in the Western world: the process by which it was abandoned and forgotten.
175 Quoted in Michell 1969, 145.
176 See, for instance, Ashe 1957.
177 Bryant 1978 is a capable modern translation.
178 Quoted in Michell 1997, 145.
179 I have used Ralls 2003 for the following historical summary.
180 Lambert 1992, 180.
181 Schonfield 1984, 164.
182 See the discussion in Weston 1983, 149–163.
183 Cited in Weston 1983, 157.
184 Partner 1981 discusses some of these claims in their historical context.
185 See, for example, Greer and Warnock 2011.
186 Miller 1969, 19–20.
187 Carey 2007, 12.
188 Chétien de Troyes 1991, 382.
189 John Carey is a welcome exception; see Carey 2007, 9–10.
190 Schenk 2010 documents this at length; see particularly 127.
191 Weston 1983, 161–62.