First Templar Nation

by Freddy Silva

  To the casual viewer, the king’s circular seal and its central quadrature of scrambled letters anagram the word PORTUGAL.

  To the esoteric reader it reveals something altogether deeper: PORTUGRAL.

  And to the initiate it reads, in Portuguese, POR TU, O GRAL—Through you, the Grail.

  Could it be that the Templars deposited an aspect of the Graal in the town of Thamar, the namesake of the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalene?32

  Charter of Ceras.

  39

  1160. MARCH 1. A DAWN CEREMONY ON THE PROMONTORY ABOVE THAMAR . . .

  Master Gualdino laid the cornerstone of the round church the Templars would spend the next two years erecting. By its very location on a mound atop the hill, the rotunda would be the first element of the surrounding terrain to be bathed by the light of the rising sun. The timing of the ceremony embodied the ancient Egyptian practice of performing the rite of resurrection at dawn.

  The event also marked, to the day, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the first Cistercian monastery in Portugale, at Tarouca, after the Templar knight Brother Roland and a group of monks from Clairvaux met with a young Afonso Henriques.

  The rotunda’s octagonal geometry would be an homage to both the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Arabic sacred architecture; its interior was devoid of all ornament, precisely as Bernard de Clairvaux prescribed: “There must be no decoration, only proportion.”1

  During this period the Templars undertook no other project. It was a singular focus, a great work, a total and synergistic enterprise as though integral to their purpose. Only after the rotunda was complete did they turn to defensive and civic matters, first enclosing the rotunda within an extensive citadel, then focusing on Thamar and the attention the town obviously needed.

  The town was practically rebuilt from scratch, requiring the import of vast quantities of artists and stonemasons, and in the decade that followed, the Templars devoted their entire efforts to its resurrection.2 It was to become their headquarters in Portugal, the portal of the Order, containing perhaps the most significant Templar monuments in Europe.

  Whatever the Templars brought here must have been noteworthy because on a sultry July morning twenty years later, they’d wake up to find the castle besieged by a Muslim army of four hundred thousand horsemen and five hundred thousand infantrymen.*323 Even dropping a couple of zeros from such preposterous figures still leaves a disproportionate army of men eager to dispossess the Templars from a castle, an orchard, and a chapel! Certainly, the Arabs had not marched all the way from southern Spain just for the view. In any event, despite a six-day attack the Arabs were repelled, and the invading army retreated empty-handed.

  POR TU, O GRAL. “Through you, the Grail.” The same phrase inscribed beside the image of the Ark of the Covenant on the Door of Initiates at Chartres cathedral. Could the castle on the hill above Thamar be the same “castle of the wild mount” described in the Graal legend? Whether by coincidence or design, just as Gualdino’s ceremony is taking place in Thamar, Chrétien de Troyes is settling down to write his Graal story in Champagne.

  The origin behind the naming of Thamar is as intriguing as the reason why the Templars should have chosen a spot so far removed from their original homeland to give birth to their golden age. Thamara or Ta’amarah was the name given by its Arab habitants around the ninth century,4 and its choice shines some light on why the location was important beyond the site of a former Benedictine monastery where a divine virgin was martyred.

  Tamar or Tamara was the name of King David’s daughter,*335 just as it was the daughter of the union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.6 The name means “palm tree,” and to anyone acquainted with esoteric symbolism this has a profound connection with the cult of raising the dead.

  It has already been noted just how many of the Templar’s pursuits have decidedly esoteric or ancient Egyptian overtones. One of the central pillars of the Egyptian Mysteries schools is the resurrection myth featuring Osiris and his consort, Isis. Osiris ruled the kingdom until his jealous brother, Set, and seventy-two co-conspirators cut him into little pieces and unceremoniously dispersed them into the Nile. Because Osiris produced no heir, Isis was left with no son to dispose of the evil Set. In effect, she was the divine virgin presiding over a kingdom gone to ruin. Resourceful to the end, Isis sets off to gather up her husband’s body parts, magically reassembles them, and after fashioning him a new phallus made of solid gold she uses the sound of her voice, whereupon Osiris is resurrected and Isis impregnated.

  After his ordeal, Osiris returns to restore life to a barren land and shines forever as a bright star. The myth essentially outlines the ritual of living resurrection, and the symbol of Osiris’s experience is the palm tree. Osiris himself is depicted with green skin, making him the oldest expression of the cult of the Green Man, the tutelary deity of fertility who revitalizes the land and raises it from the dead.

  One of the many visualizations of the Green Man. Roslin Chapel.

  The god Amun. Note the two tablets of wisdom on his head.

  It seems Osiris was adept at magic, perhaps because the priest-god who assists him in the ritual is the ibis-headed Djehuti (the Greek Thoth-Hermes), who is credited “as the author of every branch of knowledge, both human and divine . . . the inventor of astronomy and astrology, the science of numbers and mathematics, geometry and land surveying, medicine and botany.”7 Djehuti is nothing less than the personification of the mind of God. He is a half-human/half-divine encyclopedia, a skin-and-bones representation of the stone tablets written by God. As it happens, Djehuti’s knowledge descended from heaven from the god Amun, whose image is depicted on temple walls wearing a crown of two tablets, suspiciously identical in shape to those handed to Moses.

  After the Templars recovered the knowledge secreted beneath Temple Mount, they swore to “rebuild the temple,” physically and symbolically. This they did by specifically selecting Thamar, in the land of Ceras, a lifeless piece of land they held out for after a lengthy controversy with the Bishop of Lisbon. And now we know why.

  The crowning of the hill with a round church gave it the appearance of Mount Sion and its curved basilica, the location where the Essenes once performed their secret ministries. If the Templars aimed to re-create the essence of Mount Sion, did they also re-create the rites of resurrection? For one thing, the unusual structure above Thamar was never a church to begin with; it never contained an altar inside or adjacent to it.8 And why should the Templars require a second place of worship when they already had the nearby church of Santa Maria do Olival, where their prayers and sacred offices were conducted on a daily basis?

  Even more curious, during sieges, the people of Thamar were never permitted inside the rotunda, arguably the safest, most secure building inside the citadel. And had they been allowed, getting inside would have proved awkward, for this rotunda had no door.9

  40

  PRESENT ERA. APRIL. INSIDE THE ROTUNDA OF TOMAR . . .

  The plain Cistercian interior of the rotunda lasted four centuries until it became unfashionable for a house of God to resemble the domicile of a hermit.1 What once was a soaring arc of eight plain columns within a circular ambulatory eventually became a decadence of decor and polychrome statues, proving the Baroque maxim that what is wo512rth doing is worth overdoing. Bernard de Clairvaux would be venting liquid magma were he standing beside me right now. I could almost hear his famous admonition of the Benedictines bouncing off the rotunda’s lofty walls: “I say naught of . . . the costly polishings, the curious carvings and paintings which attract the worshipper’s gaze and hinder his attention of God.”2

  It had been fifteen years since I asked myself, “Why did the Templars come to my country of origin?” The silent reply was a slow and soaring hill of research. Looking under one stone led to a maze of roots, each connected to an ever-expanding and boundless body of a benevolent monster whose intricacies became as multifaceted as the three faces of Hermes. I had asked an hone
st question. I had not anticipated the loudness of the reply or the controversial nature of the material I unearthed. Now I had to complete the journey by returning to the rotunda of Tomar (as it is spelled today) and the labyrinthine convent that sprouted around its core.

  Interior of the rotunda. The decor was added four centuries later.

  It is a maiden I adore. Only now did I become profoundly aware I had been inadvertently following a Graal quest.

  One aspect of the Graal is a search for secret knowledge capable of raising an individual from the spiritual death that is life on the material plane. This knowledge derives from an ancient system of teachings spanning incalculable ages, brotherhoods, and continents, and its source material is often linked to the Ark of the Covenant. Perhaps elements of the Graal or the Ark were deposited right here. Perhaps inside the rotunda was the same marble keystone with an iron ring leading to a chamber of Mysteries, as it once did on Temple Mount. Certainly the founding of the rotunda became such a potent symbol that it remains the civic day for the town of Tomar, and until the change of calendars from Julian to Gregorian it even marked the first day of Portugal’s official civil calendar.

  The rotunda, Tomar.

  To reach the rotunda it is necessary to walk up the hill along a meandering old cobblestone track that leads to the Gate of the Sun. Once inside the castle walls and its well-manicured courtyard, the aroma of lavender, lemon, and orange is as intoxicating to the senses as the sight of the round temple the knights erected. Indeed, it does bear a passing resemblance to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, even the old basilica of Mount Sion—the sacred places whose allure captivated the imagination of Godefroi de Bouillon, Hugues de Payns, Count Dom Henrique, and so many other protagonists in this Templar-Cistercian drama.

  The building is not so much attractive as it is bewitching and entrancing.

  Its exterior circular look is in fact an optical illusion; it is a sixteen-sided polygonal structure held by reassuring buttresses. Inside, the ceiling rests on a central arcade of eight slender columns, gathered like quatrefoils and arranged in accordance to the eight-sided octagon. The space between the columns and the gallery wall is defined by the invisible geometry of a hexagram: two intertwined triangles each representing nature’s complementary opposites in perfect equilibrium, much like the symbolism behind the Templar emblem of two knights riding a horse.

  The octagonal motif of the churches the Templars erected is heavily indebted to Arabic sacred architecture, which uses this geometry because it represents the fully illuminated human. It is a square unfolded twice, and just as the circle represents spirit and all that exists, so the square represents its physical counterpart, matter, and the four elements that make it so: earth, air, fire, water. The four remaining faces are representative of the invisible realm. Thus, by working with this talisman one strives to achieve utmost harmony between the material and spiritual. This was, and continues to be, the aim of all esoteric and gnostic sects.

  The octagon’s derivatives are the infinity symbol and the number 8. Notable avatars associated with these talismans are Jesus, Mohammed, the archangel Michael, the Arthurian wizard Merlin, and last but certainly not least, Djehuti, patron of scribes and god of magic, healing, and wisdom. His temple is situated in Khmun (eight-town), after the group of eight Egyptian deities or natural forces who represent the world before creation.*34

  The Templar inner brotherhood followed a secret doctrine,3 and so their ceremonies appropriately took place in small, secret chapels inside their temples, such as the one below their preceptory in Paris.4 What rituals were performed required total devotion to the craft, and the contents were revealed strictly to this inner brotherhood, and then only after a period of observation, typically one year. This law was broken on pain of death, as graphically described in Article 29 of the Rule of the Elected Brothers:

  If a Brother forgets, either by carelessness or by gossip, and makes known the smallest part of the secret rules or what happens in Chapters at night, let him be punished according to the greatness of his fault, with detention time in chains and exclusion from the chapters. If treason is proven and he has spoken with malicious intent, he is condemned to life imprisonment or even secretly put to death if it serves the best interests of all.5

  The Templars were utterly devoted to Tomar, and given what we know so far about their tendencies to follow an ancient system of knowledge, it would have been uncharacteristic if they had not adopted these practices in, around, or under the rotunda itself.

  In the Copper Scroll, one of the most important buildings described in the Inner Temple court is the House of Tribute. The entrance was still known in the first century BC as the Gate of Offering, and it stood on a stone platform, each of its four corners bearing a small chamber, one of which was the Chamber of the Hearth.6 Inset into the floor was a marble slab that could be raised by a fixed metal ring to reveal an opening into a deep cavern below.7 In an adjacent chamber, the Staircase of Refuge led to an underground passageway and into the Chamber of Immersion, where, presumably, rituals such as the “raising of the dead” were performed. This may be the same chamber that stood out from the others and merited Captain Warren, the British excavator, to be lowered by rope into its rectangular form; it is the same chamber once described in the Talmud as a secret room kept for special ceremonies.

  The Book of Ezekiel similarly describes how the elders of Jerusalem “engaged in secret mysteries . . . of Egyptian provenance” in darkness under the Temple of Solomon.8 Such chambers still exist beneath the altars of early churches and cathedrals throughout Europe, particularly those erected above preexisting ancient temples where identical rituals were performed. Some are well known: Chartres cathedral, Mont Saint Michel, Roslin Chapel, and so forth. In Egypt, there exists a narrow, claustrophobic chamber beneath the temple of Dendera decorated with one-of-a-kind reliefs depicting a kind of rebirthing process. Just to the west, the chapel of Osiris in Abydos contains a mural depicting the same ceremony in graphic terms, while in the adjacent Osirion—an underground temple made from cyclopean blocks of red granite—the Mysteries of birth and rebirth were also taught and conducted, and although the whole site lies five hundred miles southwest of Jerusalem, the Osirion and the Templars are linked.

  Resurrection ritual. Abydos.

  The prime Templar locations in Jerusalem are marked by the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Solomon’s stables, where the knights resided; the third is the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont de Sion. The three sites form a perfect isosceles triangle, a symbolic holy trinity. When this triangle is bisected, an imaginary line extends all the way into the Osirion.

  Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

  The Osirion triangle.

  Geodesy on a continental scale.

  Likewise, the Essenes conducted their Mysteries teachings in underground chambers on Mount Sion, and after their church fell into a state of disrepair Godefroi de Bouillon made additions to the original floor plan in the form of the Chamber of Mysteries, which was supported on a foundation of eight pillars, a room where the initiate ate a meal prior to the living resurrection ritual, also known as the Last Supper.9 Godefroi therefore may have been maintaining a tradition upon which Sion is based, because the word sion is related to the Arabic sahi (ascend to the top), suggesting the location is interconnected with the process of “raising.”10 This Arabic interpretation is echoed in Jewish Kaballah, where the reference to Sion assumes an esoteric mantle as Tzion (a spiritual point from which all reality emerges).

  Interior of the rotunda.

  By far the most direct reference to Templar secret chambers lies in Gisors, France, whose own rotunda is indistinguishable from the one in Tomar. The Gisors structure sits atop a Neolithic mound on which the Romans built a temple. Beneath its floor, an extensive tunnel system links two nearby churches, one possessing an underground initiation chamber.11 Because such rooms are fundamental to the structural integrity of the building, they cannot be removed without making the s
tructure above unsafe. It follows that if the Templars practiced the Mysteries in Portugal they must have built a similar chamber under the rotunda, and that chamber must still exist.

  Alas, poverty and ignorance, the twin devils of conservation, have not been kind to the rotunda of Tomar. Details that would help the quest for a hidden chamber have been covered or replaced by well-intended attempts at preservation and, worse, by a lack of documentation. When its flagstone floor was refurbished in the mid-twentieth century no notes were made (at least none are known to have survived), nor were photographs taken of details that might appear out of the ordinary. If I had hoped to find a replica of the rectangular keystone with an iron ring and a staircase leading to an underground chamber, my quest was temporarily thwarted.

  I retired to the adjacent courtyard and comforted myself with an orange freshly plucked from one of the four trees. Hope was in need of resuscitation. This was provided later that afternoon during a visit to the town archives, where a brief, yet tantalizing newspaper account from the 1940s describes how the exterior of the rotunda had been coated with reinforced concrete that hid or destroyed the entrance to what was then described as a kind of crypt.

  41

  1865. THE VATICAN. POPE PIUS IX GETS ALL STEAMED UP . . .

  Pope Pius IX quickly made his point as he launched Multiplices inter, a fulmination against the Order of the Freemasons, in which its predecessors, the Knights Templar, were said to have followed a Johannite heresy from the very beginning: “The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations, had two doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic. Thus they deceived the adversaries whom they sought to supplant.”1