The Seal

by Adriana Koulias

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ADRIANA KOULIAS was born in Brazil and migrated to Australia with her family when she was nine years old. She has a passion for Philosophy, History and Esoteric Science, and lectures internationally on these topics.

  Also by Adriana Koulias:

  Temple of the Grail

  The Sixth Key

  Fifth Gospel – A Novel

  THE SEAL

  ADRIANA KOULIAS

  First edition 2006, Second edition 2007, Third Edition (ebook 2008) in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia.

  Fourth Edition published by Zuriel Press 2012.

  Copyright © Adriana Koulias 2006.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Zuriel Press.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Koulias, Adriana. The seal.

  ISBN 978-0-9874620-1-5

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Contents

  Dedication

  Quotes

  List of Characters

  Author's_Note

  THE FIRST DAY

  A Question

  The First Card

  1 The Fall of Acre

  2 The Prophecy

  3 Leper's Confidant

  4 Departure

  5 Etiene and Iterius

  6 The Old Church

  7 Salamis

  The Second Card

  8 France

  9 The Young Master

  10 Poitiers

  11 The Pope and the Grandmaster

  12 The Keeper

  13 The Mercenaries

  14 The Gold

  15 The Fair King

  16 One Man's Funeral is Another Man's Lure

  FIRST NIGHT SECOND DAY

  Pause

  17 The Arrest

  18 Light in Dakness, Word in Silence

  19 Credo

  20 The Notary

  The Third Card

  21 Judas or Peter

  22 Shroud

  23 Chapter at Tomar

  25 Bodies

  26 The English Galley

  27 Madness

  28 Devils and Angels

  30 Clement V

  31 The Pope and Charles of Valois

  32 The Herbalist

  33 The Treasurer

  The Fourth Card

  35 The Woman

  36 Tryst

  37 The Lawyer

  38 The King and his Counsellor

  39 Confessions

  SECOND NIGHT, THIRD DAY

  Remembering

  The Fifth Card

  40 Wolf

  41 The Slaying of the Wolf

  42 Pierre de Bologna

  43 The Bishop of Paris

  The Sixth Card

  44 The Burning

  45 Atonement

  46 Jaques de Molay

  47 Nine Templars

  48 The Suppression

  49 Know Thyself

  50 Conspiracy

  51 Midnight Oil for Burning

  52 Conspiracy

  53 Castle on the Mountain

  54 De Nogaret's Mistress

  55 New Covenant

  56 Via Crucis

  57 The Island of the Jews

  58 Hell

  59 Snakes and Snares

  60 The Stag

  61 Round Room

  62 Jourdain

  63 Voices

  The Seventh Card

  64 The Seal

  65 The Answer

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  I dedicate this book to the great teachers Zarathustra, Manes, Buddha, Scythianos, Christian Rosencreutz, Rudolf Steiner, and all those who have shown humanity how to look at the world with the eyes of the spirit. And to Etienne, wherever he may be now, for his inspiration.

  Anyone who views life other than as an illusion that consumes itself is still entangled in life. Life should not be a novel given to us, but one written by us.

  Novalis

  In order for the word of the spirit to penetrate the flesh of man, man must first be shaken to his depths by the great upheavals of history, then eternal truth bursts forth like a stream of light.

  Eduard Shuré

  List of Characters

  Alphonse: Templar scribe

  Andrew of Scotland: Templar knight

  Aubert: Norman mercenary

  Ayme d’Oselier: Marshal of the Order

  Bartholomew: Commander of Tomar

  Charles of Valois: Count of Romagne, Emperor Pretender to Constantinople and brother of Philip of France

  Delgado: Catalan mercenary

  Enguerrand de Marigny: Royal Chamberlain, Co-adjutor and Rector of the Kingdom of France

  Etienne de Congost: Seneschal of the Templar Order and deputy to Jacques de Molay

  Geoffrey de Charney: Preceptor of Normandy

  Gideon: Norman mercenary

  Gilles Aicelin: Archbishop of Narbonne

  Guillaume de Baufet: Bishop of Paris, Julian’s guardian

  Guillaume de Nogaret: Royal lawyer, Secretary General and Keeper of the Royal Seals of the Kingdom of France

  Guillaume de Plaisians: Counsellor and lawyer for the French Crown, de Nogaret’s aide and protégé

  Hugues de Pairaud Visitor of the Order in France, head of the Temple bank

  Iterius: Egyptian sergeant of the Order; astrologer to the King of France

  Author’s Note

  The wind comes from the mountains today. It whistles and moans over the bay and enters the house of the heart, and sings. It echoes the inevitable, the irreversible.

  It speaks of secrets.

  There are always secrets . . . locked in the resin of forgotten and distorted things, buried in the silt of a thousand years, encrusted, lifeless in the substratum. These are the secrets of the mountain, of the dreamless sleep of the will of nature. But the secrets of the will of men lie hidden beneath the veil of Isis and they are created in the form of surfaces, each more revealing than a fossil, more brilliant than a diamond. To lift the veil, however, is to know both Paradise and the Abyss, the child in the throat of a God and in the Beast.

  Once you stretch forth your hand, once you trace the signs in the air, all things are set into motion and there is no turning back.

  THE FIRST DAY

  A QUESTION

  Therein lies a tale which I must needs tell thee.

  The Völsunga Saga, chapter XIII

  Lockenhaus, July 2006

  The old woman said that clouds were moving in from the north bringing rain to dust the pollen from the lime trees. Until then it would remain hot.

  Her shop door was open, from inside the smell of dust, mothballs, ashes and memories ventured out to mingle with the breeze-borne scent of sunburnt flowers and warm grass.

  She was now very old and given to sitting in the shade of the portal outside her shop to watch, with an indolent eye, the parade of tourists as they walked the flinted path to the castle. Now and again one would pause to gaze at the little paper¬weights in the shape of suits of armour with helmets that stapled paper, while another would handle the time-dulled key rings, fridge magnets, assorted crosses, little crystal cups and grail-like pewter mugs emblazoned with the red cross.

  Day after day they came and went, a never-ceasing number, preoccupied with their ritual of inspection, herding past the maps, stencilled wooden boxes, baskets and tablecloths, buying

  this and that, flicking through ancient postcards and age-worn books piled up like obelisks on the floor.


  ‘Beauseant! ’ she would yell at them when she felt like it, and then she would raise her head with an arm extended to mimic a gravity-laden archangel. The tourists would pause and smile, thinking her a sideshow for their amusement.

  Sometimes when she had their attention, she would tell the story of the Templars of Lockenhaus, the castle beyond her little shop. She would tell them of Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V who together brought down the most valiant Order in the known world. When she spoke thus she seemed to mislay her ritual of patient disillusionment, her eyes would lose themselves in the distance of things and she would smile with a knowing, no longer an old woman.

  No one guessed, however, that she was the keeper of secrets.

  Not the government officials who ran the castle, not the caretakers, not even the residents of the little village, with its polite square bordered by flowers where stood the steep church and the school. How could anyone have known that this frail old woman kept the memory of this place stored up and sealed in her heart like a box full of wonders? That she knew the meaning of the strange symbols carved into the walls of the castle? That she knew the exact location of the escape hatch in the well, or the history of the blood hall where the last battle between the great knights of the Temple and its foes took place?

  This woman knew the accurate chronology of the families that had owned the great ‘Bourg’, and what lay behind the symbolic devices on each shield that hung in the round room of stone. She knew and so she smiled when tourists, scholars and professors, doctors of this or that, came to Lockenhaus with their varied opinions.

  No one asked her, and she in turn told no one. You see, she was waiting for me.

  I met her on a Friday in late July. I had been staying at the hotel adjoining the castle and was paused browsing in her shop for a postcard to send to my family. This day she was not sitting outside her shop but stood staring at me from behind the counter. She wore a blue dress slightly torn at the collar and an intense taciturn expression.

  ‘Are you a musician?’ she asked. ‘Come to play at the concerts?’

  I told her that I was writing a book about the knights Templar and that the castle interested me.

  This didn’t seem to impress her. ‘The knights interest everyone. I suppose you are writing nonsense. That is all that is ever written about them these days.’

  I told her that I hoped to write the truth.

  She laughed a hearty laugh. ‘The truth! This has to be lived . . . it is a living thing . . . So . . . when did you become a writer?’

  Her eyes were narrowed and in that heavy gaze I felt her waiting, anticipating my words.

  ‘Only a few years ago,’ I told her. ‘I was many things before that.’

  She nodded her head almost imperceptibly. ‘Like I thought . . . in another life you died a violent death.’

  Now it was my turn to laugh. She, on the other hand, became all the more serious. ‘Have you been up there yet?’ she said, inferring the castle.

  I told her that I had.

  ‘I never go there . . . it is too tall, and those walls! A fall from that parapet would kill you in an instant.’

  She reached into a pocket of her embroidered apron and from it I saw her pull out cards. ‘Come outside and sit, the sun is warm.’ She closed one eye. ‘If the truth is what you are after then perhaps I can help you . . . I know one or two things.’

  I was about to give some excuse when she interrupted me with a hand. ‘First I must consult the cards.’

  To tell the truth, the last thing I wanted was to find myself held up in conversation with an old woman. I thought of the myriad of notes I had to sort through, the emails waiting for me in my room, but something in her tone, her manner, intrigued me and I found myself following her out into the day. When we were both seated with the sun slanting over us, she began to shuffle her cards and one after another laid them down, the seventh card crowning the others. Her fingers were long, elegant and nervous, her nails tidy and clean. She brushed a wisp of grey hair from her faded blue eyes and said, ‘I pick out seven from the Major Arcana of twenty-two cards . . . The knights used cards, did you know that?’

  She turned over the first and placed it face up on the table. ‘Judgement,’ she said. ‘The angel blows a trumpet... and there are people coming from their graves... after every death there is a rebirth...you will salvage something buried a long time.’

  She turned over the second card. ‘Strength,’ she said. ‘A woman opens the mouth of the lion, above her the symbol of infinity . . . This means there is something lying in the depths of your consciousness in that part of life that is dead, and you have to master your will to know it, you must have courage, without it there is nothing.’

  She turned over the third card and paused a long time; a grave look descended over the greying eyebrows, the high cheek¬bones and the pursed lips. ‘The Moon . . . this card recalls the past, what has been – you are a hunter of history, but beware of the wolf, he wishes to lead you to false memories; beware of the dog, he shall dazzle you with illusionary traps – they are hidden enemies. To escape them you must travel the path between two towers, between the coldness of your thoughts and the hardness of your will. These two things can only become three through love, when the moon joins with the sun . . . Do you know what this symbol is?’

  I told her it was the symbol of the Grail.

  She stared at me a long time, too long. ‘It is not what they think, you know,’ she said. ‘It is a cup when the spirit enters the cavity of the head, an emerald when it enters the heart, and a diamond when it reaches the bones . . . It is not a bloodline as they like to think of it nowadays! How blind they are to think it the kingly blood of a mortal made god when it is nothing if not the blood of a god made mortal!’

  She nodded at this and returned to the fourth card. ‘Ah . . . the Star,’ she hissed. ‘The woman gathers knowledge, one foot in the universal pool, the other on the earth. This is the divine virgin who brings you to what you seek in the right places. The knowledge turned wisdom that becomes love . . . you must become a philosopher . . . a lover of wisdom . . .’ she said to me.

  She turned the fifth card over. ‘The World, understanding . . . you shall succeed if your heart is pure, if it has been transformed . . .’ She gazed upwards at a hawk describing circles high over the lime trees. ‘“The eye of the hawk sees all things from above . . . its gaze is open, shut, perfect . . . it sees the folly of men . . .” Do you recognise it?’

  Those words were familiar to me. ‘Egyptian?’

  She nodded slightly. When she turned the next card over, it was upside down. ‘The Chariot . . . well, well . . . I had expected it . . . obstacles and dangers . . .’

  The last and seventh card was before her. She held it to her breast and spoke reverently. ‘This is the most important card of all of them. The other cards are subject to the seventh.’ She set it down. ‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘The Hierophant! The ancient mysteries of Egypt! Only a son of the widow can know the secrets. Do you know who the widow is?’ But she didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Isis! The widow is Isis . . . the soul! She mourns for her groom Osiris, the spirit . . . She hides beneath her veil all knowledge. She is one and the same as the divine mother, the Sophia of the Greeks.’ She pointed a finger at me. ‘You must be cautious, there is a price to be paid for lifting her veil . . .’

  She sat back then and her face softened and tears welled in her eyes. ‘Well . . . you have taken a long time, I have waited while the world has gone to ruin. What has kept you?’

  For some reason this sudden familiarity didn’t seem out of place and I found myself telling her that I lived a very long distance away, that I was married and had children. Responsibilities, I told her, had prevented me from coming to the castle sooner.

  ‘Children?’ She raised a brow. ‘Ah well, well . . .’ She gave a chuckle. ‘How different everything is!’ A number of tourists passed, talking brightly, taking photos of the portal. She sat forward and
spoke quietly. ‘You know the world has been asking questions, and it began to stir my remembering some months ago, that is how I knew you would come.’ She bent an ear as if she were listening to something inaudible and picked up the cards. ‘He waits . . . see there?’ She was pointing through the portal. ‘Do you see how you have kept us? He tells me he is not concerned that we have met . . . that is a good sign, but we must hurry.

  ‘At first it will seem disordered,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry, that is natural if you want to know everything at once. You have to look in many diverse places; like the cards, each has its own knowing to tell, but each one alone can never reveal the whole

  truth. For that you must look at all the cards together, do you follow? Oh never mind . . . at the end you will see everything as a whole, and all that you have come to see will be made plain to you – the truth!’

  There was a promise in her voice and a weaving of something familiar in it. If I hadn’t known it before, I knew it now – I had to stay and listen to what she had to tell me.

  ‘Not many knew about the underground chapel,’ she began, ‘the Kultraum as they call it nowadays. Have you seen it?’

  I told her that it had left me with mixed feelings.

  ‘Well, that is because this castle has suffered a terrible history since the slaughter of the knights . . . from one owner to another . . . some evil, some good . . . but none of them found it, only later did the old man come across the underground chapel, by accident.’

  I asked her if she meant the curator, Anton Keller.

  She nodded, losing her patience. ‘Yes, who else? He found it, but he did not find what is hidden in it.’ She was smiling now. ‘That is the secret . . .’

  I asked her how she knew this secret.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You must have faith . . . Do you have faith?’

  ‘A writer has to have faith in stories,’ I said.

  ‘Good, then I will tell you mine and you will listen . . . It was hidden long ago, that night, when the men were asleep on their pallets, there . . .’ she gestured to the castle, ‘shortly before chapter, when the seneschal took himself through those bitter corridors to the courtyard flooded with moonlight. He wasn’t to know that it would be the night they would come, the imperial soldiers, through the secret passage inside the well . . . He didn’t know it and so he took himself to the underground chapel and told no one, since no one could know where he would hide it.