These thoughts speared into his soul a channel so wide he felt himself emptied and sunk down into nothingness.
A howl came out of his soul, and the hiss of a whisper came into his ear: ‘If you love them more than you love yourself, you may yet prevent it! The death of your brothers, the burnings, the arrest of the Order! The seal shall return all things to their former state . . . you need only call on its power!’
The breath departed from his lungs and formed itself in the cold stillness into portions of eternity grasped in the moment – the flame script of his life. In it he observed those years before Acre, when faith had a footing and a man knew what season would follow from the next. He was full with despair and longing . . . to return all things to their former state.
It was far-reaching into his soul and alluring to his mind, this desire.
‘The seal must obey its bearer,’ the voice said. ‘It shall hammer out the world into a shape not displeasing to you! Conjure the spirits in the earth; in the depths; in the sun and in the stars; in the waters and in the seas, and all which they contain; in the winds, the whirlwinds, and the tempests; in the virtue of all herbs, plants, and stones; in all which is in the heavens, upon the earth, and in all the abysses of the shades. Conjure them and they shall do your bidding!’
But his heart in its death throes brought him to his senses, and Etienne, bent and gasping, was made aware in that moment of the impiety of this backward glance, of the wickedness of this allurement. It was not his place to unfasten destiny, to shape the world and use its forces for his ends, but to live life according to God’s laws! He knew the truth of it, and it formed for him a bulwark against which he could lean. He threw his mind away from reveries and turned it towards the shadows.
My will is not my own!
The air agitated around him.
‘Old man! Dead man! The evil in you shall overtake the good!’
It – will – not!
The chapel swirled. There was a noiseless thunder. The creature was poised at the edges of Etienne’s soul. ‘Where is your Archangel now!’ it said, and at that moment Etienne was knocked back, and within him he felt the ice-sharp penetration of that creature of dark surfaces.
In his head he heard a thousand voices cry in lamentation, and wondered if they were the voices of his brothers calling to him their rebuke. But he stood firm – the power was not his to use. He would stand before the smooth eye of his foe and feel what the abyss had in the making for him. He would look to the wide spaces and fill his heart with God’s weaving love, he would gaze upwards to the heights in selfless striving.
‘Save me, oh God, by thy name!’
Shadows furled and mantled, rising black inside him. He surrendered to the will of God and prepared to succumb, to the smothering of his spirit.
Oh man, you have known yourself – now behold anew the symbol and the name of a sovereign and conquering God, through which all the Universe fears, trembles, and shudders.
From the vast shades amid which stood his hard-pressed will a growing radiance, a spirit fire, drew about him, forming a circle to resist the shadows.
A feeling of safety washed over him, there was a release and his mind fell away.
How long he lay on the stone of the chapel he could not tell. When he woke he was numb from cold and hollowed out from torment and bliss. In his heart he knew that the mystery of his Order had not been stained with iniquity, it remained inviolate and must now be put to rest. Jacques had been right – it was a powerful thing, able to make a seal upon the heart of any man, be he profane or saintly.
He was paused a long time without breath, then the bell was heard for chapter and there were sounds of footsteps coming from the dormitories. He mustered what strength was left to him since he knew the men were making their way to the hall for the council. They would be looking for him, and though his heart was swelled with anguish for it, he knew he must do it now, before they found him.
He undertook to remove the ring from his finger but it would not come since he had grown together with it and it would not live without him. His head felt light and feathery as he brought forth the skull dagger given to him by Jacques de Molay those many years ago; the same dagger with which he had killed Marcus. He used it to trace the cross over his breast and made a sign in the air with it, calling on St Michael to keep him from falling out of his head before it was done.
He held his breath and lifted the knife over his hand.
The old woman was staring at the vision before her eyes. ‘Who is it?’ she asked St Michael. ‘Who is this man Etienne?’
In so many years she had not allowed herself to think on it. Now the question that had waited behind her tongue, kept silent by a force of will, was to be answered.
She blinked and blinked again.
It is you.
She gasped, and her hands shook, a tremor passed over her and she was no longer herself but that man, that knight Etienne on his knees with the ring in his hand. ‘My faith runs in a thin, pale stream and my soul dries up as if it were barren soil. I no longer know for what purpose I have battled and struggled and died . . . for this end of ends, as an old, wasted woman?’
It is time!
‘My eyes are not worthy – they are profane!’
Behold! What has been hidden since the fall!
Etienne put down the dagger, raised the hinged lid over the seal and leant closer to the candle. The light was cast over the inward being of the ring and was reflected from brass and iron. Etienne understood what he was seeing: the figure of a pentagram fused to a hexagram overlaid by a backward ‘S’. In the middle a sun sat within the cup of a sickle moon; above it a backward word – Yom, and below that the word Layla. To the right the moon stood alone with Pisces, to the left the sun and Virgo.
At the apex the backward letters RE and IS. Etienne knew that it should have spelt REBIS had the word not been interrupted by the two staves of the sign for Twins. Below its polar opposite, Archer raised its arrow toward the sun.
With his eye he entered into those lines, into those symbols, and moved through them and out into the emptiness of space. He saw the deepest night Layla shot through with intelligible light – Yom. He saw the equilibrium of earth and heaven, birth and death, good and evil, resting upon the six-pointed star of his soul. He understood then that he was below what existed above; that to spell the great poem of the hidden word was to understand how in the trinity of his being was sung the harmony of the universe; how in his blood the throb of pure wisdom formed its forms, surging through his limbs, tearing and rushing through them as if through a burning glass and fashioning him in the shape of a pentagram. He was suspended and carried into the widths of space, where the winged sun of his heart resting within the moon of his soul was dragged backward across a path strewn with stars. He was Gemini at midday and Sagittarius at midnight; he dawned in Virgo and fell into the twilight of Pisces.
Do you understand what you have seen?
‘Life is regenerate, renewed, washed and pure. The two are united and the third is sealed within me.’
The world was swept up then, blown down like pollen in a sky all blue and bronze and coloured with frost, and he was thrown over the summits of ecstasy and returned to the chapel. He took a moment to recover. It seemed to him that between one heart’s pause and the next he had dreamt of the old woman of Puivert.
Now the memory of the present returned. His head moved in circles. He contrived to summon his wits to attention and his tortured body to its duty, but it took a great effort to close the hinged lid and take up the dagger into his hand. At each moment he despaired that he must soon pass out of life. He laid the ringed finger away from the others over the stone floor and, leaning over it, made a lift of the dagger once again. It paused in the air a moment, waiting for the command . . .
Cut!
He bore it down. It sliced through and the ring came away and lay useless in the shadows. There was a gush of blood and a deep heat travelled from his ab
used hand to his head. Pain, full of intensity, clawed at his throat.
Soon he would sink into the black.
He took the ring and dragged himself to the wall behind the altar, where he had seen a natural hole in the stone. He put the seal to its lip, as if it were his soul upon the edge of a parapet. It was a good fit. He made a prayer and pushed the creature in; it fell into the cavity behind.
He laid himself down then and let the pain swell and the darkness overtake him.
Now, once again, the old woman found that she was beyond the underground chapel and sitting outside her shop.
Finally she understood everything.
The sun was slanting from out of that sky and onto the writer, who was looking at her with concern. But St Michael was beyond the avenue of lime trees and he would not be kept waiting.
‘Behold, the pleasant and longed-for spring, it brings back joyfulness,’ the old woman said. ‘Violet flowers fill the meadows, the sun brightens everything, sadness is now at an end – déjà les chagrins se dissipent! ’ She put a hand to the other woman’s cheek. ‘You were right, my Jourdain . . . courage is born of pain.’
Outwards and beyond itself, her spirit saw St Michael raise his sword, and from above, a resounding light full of tender love and warm detachment entered into her spirit’s true humanity and made an imprint of Christ there. It struck life into that inner sun which converts all darkness to light, all evil to goodness. It was a fulfilment of what had begun so long ago, in the dim chamber of the great pyramid lit by a flickering flame, in that icy sarcophagus of stone. It was the sacramental marriage of his soul with the Spirit of God.
But now it was not Isis welcoming her child Horus, with open arms . . . it was the Divine Sophia, mother of all mothers welcoming the old woman’s redeemed soul.
‘Rest,’ she said. ‘You have been on a long journey . . .’
Epilogue
The old woman’s eyes closed then and the cards fell from her hands. Her head slumped to one side and the sun moved gold over her face. I leant over her, worried now, and tried to wake her, but she would not open her eyes.
I came back to Lockenhaus a little over a year later to launch my book The Seal, on 13 October, seven hundred years after the arrest of the Order of Knights Templar in France. In the Ritterhaus, the dining hall of the knights, I spoke of the last hours of the Templars of Lockenhaus. I informed the guests that this hall had been called ‘the Blood Hall’ because legend had it that the blood of the Templars could not be washed from the flags for a hundred years. It was a quaint anecdote, something to discuss while they consumed a feast fit for ‘robber barons’. Afterwards, while my guests were eating dessert and listening to the virtuoso violinist Gideon Kremer, I excused myself for a moment and ventured out to the snow-covered courtyard, descending the steps that led to the underground chapel – where Etienne had faced his demons and met his end.
I stood in the dark nave of stone before the altar and thought of Etienne and the old woman. I searched for the familiar symbols – the sun, the moon, the Vesica Pisces and the twin spheres. I walked the sacred geometry, the fusion of hexagram and pentagram built into the rectangle of the chapel. I followed the line of an ‘S’ from end to end and came to the hole in the stone, I took out a little key-ring torch and looked inside. I could see nothing in its depths. I sat with my back to the wall and thought of the legends of Solomon’s Seal. It was known in Judaism, Christianity and Islam – a signet ring on which the name of the ‘Most High God’ was engraved, made of both brass and iron; the brass, related to Mercury, was used to command good forces and the iron, related to Mars, could command evil. It seemed strange to me that I had seen with my soul’s eye the source of these legends; the symbols which had become the gateway to vast dimensions – both terrible and wonderful.
I remembered now, how I had not entirely understood the seal’s secret until I had come to write the book’s epilogue. I realised that I had not fully grasped the seal’s power, or why it had been so painstakingly guarded. In order to understand, I had to return to Lockenhaus in my meditations and revisit Etienne’s experience. Only then did a picture begin to emerge, like a whisper in my soul of what the old woman could not have told me when she had been alive.
It showed me this: that the seal’s secret was twofold.
What arose first was the power it contained, through its symbols, to loosen the soul and allow it entry into a sphere of forces kept hidden from human awareness since the fall; the forces behind all living things, the four elements and all substance and matter which they contain; the Tree of Life – the power of a living god. These are not moral forces so they are neither good nor evil. However, as Etienne had experienced, they hold an attraction for the darkness of egotism – all the hidden tendencies and inclinations that lean towards wickedness. Philip the Fair through his peculiar destiny had an intuition of this and sought to use it for his own ends. Etienne, like his brothers, had experienced this double, whom the Templars knew as Baphomet, in their meditations and had built up the strength of will necessary to resist its temptation.
After this realisation the seal’s second power began to make itself known to me, a power that went beyond the mere resistance of evil.
The old woman of Puivert had told Etienne: ‘You are two things, two minds, and two wills . . . to these be added a third, when the third comes it shall be the end of something, but it shall bring an answer to the question you carry in your heart.’ I knew now what she meant. Etienne had been an initate of Isis and a warrior of Christ, but he had to wait for the experiences of these two lives to mature in a third life as a woman before he could be shown the seal’s second secret.
What had been revealed to her? That there would come a time when all the wisdom in the soul would be transformed through a sacramental marriage with the essence of Christ – known in past times as Vishva Karmen, Rama, Krishna, Osiris, Apollo, Mithras?
But King Solomon was the ancestor of Jesus. He was destined to look to the advent of these times as a distant reality. His task became clear to me, he had prepared the way for the future by making known only the Layla – the dark power – of the seal which he depicted in what has become known as Solomon’s Key. The Yom aspect of the seal, the future potential, did not concern itself with power but with love; a love so mighty and pure that it was capable of redeeming evil and turning it towards the service of the good. This love, this product of the marriage between man and God, he secreted in the words of his Song of Songs and upon the seal’s ciphers, thereby making it only accessible to those who could understand it.
But there was always the danger that it would fall into the possession of unworthy men, whose knowledge was gained by spiritually unlawful means. I could scarcely contemplate what it would have yielded in the hands of the avaricious Philip the Fair, or the egocentric Clement V.
Jacques de Molay and Etienne had fulfilled their task of preventing this feminine mystery from falling into profane hands. The old woman had also fulfilled hers – she had waited for me, to rouse it from its sleep.
You see . . . she knew that the future had arrived, that the world was stumbling blindly upon what Etienne had so carefully guarded and put to rest.
I thought of how we meddle with the forces of creation and destruction in the name of science. What would be the spiritual consequences of crossing the threshold that separates us from these forces in a way that is not conscious? Moreover, what of the conscious striving for these secrets? I had learnt in my research for The Seal of a shadowy world of occult brotherhoods in whose circles ancient, decadent, rituals are resurrected in order to gain access to these forces; rituals of blood, that I discovered did not differ so much from those used by the Mexican priests of Taotl at their killing stones or from Philip the Fair’s use of torture and death at the stake. This brought something else to mind, Etienne’s skull dagger – had it not come from a land beyond the scope of maps? Perhaps Etienne had been destined to use it to redeem an aspect of that evil?
There is of course so much in the old woman’s story that will only be understood in time. I had experienced it in a way that others will only read about. All I can do is leave them to decide the truth of what I have written for themselves.
I got up now and dusted off my clothes, thinking back to some days before when I was sitting in the warmth of the Heiling cafe in the little village square. There I learnt that the advent of the book had caused the people of the village to be taken by nostalgia. It seems they have nurtured a new memory of the old woman and stories about her have grown like the cobwebs over the door to her shop. She was the old woman who could make dung smell sweet and knew how to speak with ghosts and walk with angels; the woman who could heal fatal boils and could bring dead children back to life. She could advise farmers on how to discourage the growth of weeds and the best way to make the mixture that went into the cow horns to fertilise the soil. She knew the mystery of what lay behind light things and dark things; she understood the motions of the planets, could explain gravity, knew the names of the stars and could tell which way north was without a compass, just from smelling the air.
She was the woman who read the Tarot, shouted ‘Beauseant’ and ‘Iron Awaken’, and told stories of Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V.
I left the underground chapel and walked past the relics of the Order. Leftover remnants, lifeless carcasses neatly displayed behind glass. I took myself through another route to the weapon room and through it to the castle parapet. I knew that soon I would have to return to the Ritterhaus and the world that awaited me. The sound of ‘Tabula Rasa’ played on violins and cellos floated over the dying day, resting quiet and white-laden and lit by a setting sun.
The Seal Page 38