by Freddy Silva
Although I had not found the central item on my agenda—namely the Chamber of Mysteries under the rotunda—I was satisfied with the amount of surviving evidence in support of its existence, and that all around the rotunda’s periphery remain enough signs pointing to something of great import having been taught here, generation after generation, enough to warrant the Arab caliph Yaqub al-Mansur and his million-man army to come looking for it. Perhaps he too was searching for this Graal; after all, the rambunctious young Arab leader came from the same time and place where Picatrix was translated.
All these possibilities rumbled through my mind as I passed the time beneath a group of mature trees on the hill overlooking Tomar, waiting for an early evening rainstorm to conclude its business. Below, the octagonal gothic tower of the church of John the Baptist, built on the site of a former temple of forgotten provenance,*41 rose above the rooftops like a needle emerging from its square stone box. The castle gates closed for the day, and behind them, the enchantment of the rotunda, whose invisible arms refused to soften their clasp as though another element of this Templar mystery was hiding in plain sight.12
Like the sphinx on the Giza Plateau, the rotunda and its adjacent chapel expectantly point to an object of distant significance besides the rising sun. The axis through these two buildings is offset by a few imperceptible degrees from true east. If this invisible line is extended, it descends into the plaza of Tomar, to the bell tower of the church of John the Baptist, and specifically to a small pyramidal bas relief along its foundation. People walk by this strange carving every day, they snap pictures, but no one has the slightest idea why it is there or what it means. The well-worn relief depicts a sapling out of which sprouts a fleur-de-lys; a dog and a lion stand on either side. If I were an ancient Egyptian, the dog would represent Sirius, the dog star, the embodiment of knowledge; the lion would be Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation of Leo, referred to as the royal star, which has long been described as a gateway to the records of all knowledge, the key to the Mysteries. Vedic astronomy identifies Regulus with the summer solstice, thus associating it with John the Baptist. In Sanskrit they call the star Magha (the Mighty One), from which are derived the word magi and the title Magda, as in Magdal-eder—as in Mary Magdalene.
Church of John the Baptist. And the unusual stone relief below the spire.
The dragon and Green Man pillars inside the church of John the Baptist. The gap through the two aligns to the rotunda and, 2,886 miles away, the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion.
Like threading a needle, the line bisects two columns inside the church, each bearing effigies, of a dragon and a Green Man, respectively; then it extends straight as an arrow for 2,886 miles until it strikes a hill bearing a remarkable similarity to Tomar and its rotunda—the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion.
44
1165. MONSANTO. PECULIAR BEHAVIOR ON AN UNUSUAL HILL . . .
With Gualdino Paes and the Templars busying themselves with the rebuilding of Thomar, Afonso Henriques occupied himself in eastern Portugal with the reconquering of a vertiginous outcrop of granite from the Moors.
Mons Sanctus, or Monsanto, rises abruptly out of its surrounding plain, and the conglomeration of boulders continues climbing until it reaches 2,500 feet. Below its summit a tiny settlement of great antiquity has nestled among the stones since at least Paleolithic times, its stone houses having developed organically around the gargantuan and miraculously balanced granite boulders. For the Lusitanians it was probably their most prized place of veneration. As with all true pagans, the villagers conducted a festival every May, on the Celtic fertility feast of Beltane, when the women carried clay jars full of flowers to the top of the hill and threw them from the walls of the ruined fort.
Successive Portuguese kings and Templar Masters also conducted a strange ritual of their own here: they granted Monsanto no less than four charters, which is oddly disproportionate to the size of the settlement.
Once the Templars concluded their work in Thomar their focus shifted to the construction of a citadel on top of this enigmatic hill. Any warrior certifiable enough to climb Monsanto would likely drop dead from exhaustion by the time he reached the summit, and so the walls of the fortress are understandably low.
Templar castle. Monsanto.
Erecting a fortification on top of a mountain requires considerable effort. What is worrisome is that Gualdino Paes and the Templars should have placed it below the level of the outcrops of rock immediately adjacent to the walls, making the entire site vulnerable to both enemy spying and arrows. The Templars were expert castle builders par excellence; such an oversight would be unthinkable.
Aside from the obvious strategic location of the site—from which the Templars kept an eye on the continuously troublesome king of Castilla e Léon—they once again devoted a disproportionate amount of effort attending to spiritual matters, and this on a summit where, for a good part of the year, the prevailing features are mist, bitterly cold winds, and snow. Inside the citadel they erected a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene and aligned it to reference the summer solstice sunrise; a few yards outside the protective wall they erected another, a chapel dedicated to John the Baptist, while a farther dozen yards away they rebuilt a third church, possibly of Visigothic origin but in ruins at the time.
Ever since their inception, whatever locations the Templars chose, each came with a long history of veneration. Monsanto was no different, but there are three clues that the knights also conducted secret rituals here.
The first is a series of anthropomorphic graves cut out of the granite bedrock. Although at first glance they suggest a funerary function, most are too shallow to house a body and thus of little practical use as graves. If they were used for cremation, the rock shows no effects from the application of heat. The “graves” are impossible to date, but the various styles suggest the idea was continued across many cultures.
These oddities rest on the eastern side of the summit, the traditional cardinal direction associated with the rite of spiritual resurrection. Could these granite sarcophagi, then, have been used for something other than burial?
One of the many anthropomorphic shallow sarcophagi carved out of living rock.
The answer lies at the base of the mountain, on the west side, the direction followed by initiates preparing for a ritual entrance into the Otherworld. Here, adjacent to another Templar church, lie two massive sarcophagi hewn out of the granite, each surrounded by a protruding uneven lip that must have required a time-consuming removal of bedrock. If a lid were placed on top, the resulting gap would not prevent rodents from entering and feasting on the body, essentially nullifying the purpose for which the graves were intended. The feature would be useful, however, for someone requiring little light but enough air to breathe. What is more, the interior measurements of these granite enclosures are identical to those of a famous red granite box in Egypt: the one inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid.
Not a shred of evidence exits to support the fact that the Great Pyramid’s “sarcophagus” was ever designed for funerary purposes. There is, however, substantial evidence pointing to the chamber having been a fundamental component of resurrection rituals.1 The interior harmonic of the box is shown to resonate at a frequency of 117 Hz,2 a characteristic shared with megalithic stone chambers from Malta to Ireland, many of which are known to be acoustically tuned to resonate at a common frequency of 110 Hz.3 These frequencies fall within a range that triggers a shift of activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and induces trance and altered states of awareness.4
Additional carved sarcophagi on the west side of the mountain.
The second clue is that the citadel of Monsanto neatly encloses a monolith the size of a small chapel, on whose surface is carved what appears to be the symbol of a womb. Beneath the monolith lies a hollow chamber dug out of the bedrock and soil. The deep hole is dysfunctional as a cistern, nor is it a well, but above it spread two stone arches for no obvious str
uctural purpose except that they visibly mark the path of two intersecting telluric currents. That the site is ritually significant—besides the obvious symbolism that a person is lowered into an underground room or womb—is the way in which the fortification wall behind this “cosmic egg” has been deliberately lowered by three feet, contradicting its defensive purpose. Yet the attentive visitor will note how, as the sun rises on the equinox, the day associated with ancient resurrection rituals, it is the lower height of this wall that allows the first rays of sunlight to hit the flattened top of the boulder.
Boulder above the arched underground chamber. Note the womb carving on its face. The church dedicated to Mary Magdalene looks on.
As to the third clue, it lies in the words of Bernard de Clairvaux.
Looking down into the interior of the chamber.
Strategic referencing between the “egg” stone, the lowered wall, the distant mountain, and the equinox sunrise.
45
PRESENT ERA. MONSANTO. AND OTHER PLACES FOR MUSING . . .
Bernard de Clairvaux was adamant that attention be paid first and foremost to a spiritual life and the mystical contemplation of the soul. It was this grace that led to enlightenment. One of the many positive virtues of the Cistercians was their focus on the common good, with the emphasis on fraternal charity and unity in the spirit of divine love. Much of this was achieved by adopting a submissive and charitable will.
The other was by frequenting sacred places, and Bernard’s exhortation to the Templars—to every knight, even—focuses on the importance of visiting and protecting the holy places, that they should not waste the opportunity to meditate on the deeper mysteries of life that unfold at these special locations.
It was with this advice in mind that he wrote a series of excellent meditations on positive experiences associated with personal transformation in ancient temples, particularly where avatars such as John the Baptist had demonstrated the virtue of love; in the Near East, emphasis was placed on the Holy Sepulcher as the symbol of resurrection that reveals the physical world to be a temporary stage for the transition of matter. In describing the spiritual significance of these sites, Bernard hoped the Templars would see their lives as a pilgrimage and that upon their visits they would look at sacred places with spiritual rather than material eyes.1
The overarching principle in the Cistercian ethos was the achievement of the sacred marriage between the soul and its source, a bond that launches a journey of self-discovery as a route to self-empowerment. By extension, this Cistercian ideal was also the driving force behind the Knights Templar. In this respect Bernard de Clairvaux was following a recipe that once kept ancient cultures in equilibrium for thousands of years, be they Tibetan, Zoroastrian, Egyptian, Sabean, Lusitanian, Bogomil, Cathar, or Celt. As Bernard wrote in De Laude Novae Militae, his letter in praise of the Knights Templar:
A new knighthood has appeared in the land of the Incarnation, a knighthood which fights a double battle, against adversaries of flesh and blood and against the spirit of evil. I do not think it a marvellous thing that these knights resist physical enemies with physical force, because that, I know, is not rare. But they take up arms with forces of the spirit against vices and demons and that I call not only marvellous but worthy of all the praise given to men of God . . . the knight who protects his soul with the armour of faith, as he covers his body with a coat of mail, is truly above fear and reproach. Doubly armed, he fears neither men nor demons.2
If Bernard de Clairvaux recognized immersion into sacred places as integral to personal transformation, he must have been equally aware of the mechanism at work in such locations.
A crucial component in the enactment of the Mysteries, particularly the component dealing with the “raising of the dead,” was the strategic placement of the temple. Like the Cistercians, who regularly chose areas that veered from architectural norm, the Templars also took great care in deciding the locations of their chapter houses and preceptories, as though they were sourcing a subtle element in the land.3 Without doubt they chose locations, especially in Portugal, that were richly associated with ancient traditions, particularly pre-Christian cults who honored the Earth mother Ceres, the Divine Virgin, Inanna, and Isis. The province covering most of Portugal in their time—and coincidentally the exact area donated to the Templars—was named after the goddess of Celtic creation myths, Beira. She appears in Scotland (another major Templar stronghold) as Cailleach Bheur, goddess of winter and the mother of the gods, the name nowadays simplified as Beira.4
The same applies to the Templar’s final home, Tomar, the old Nabancia. The name derives from Nabia, Lusitanian goddess of water and rivers. The body of water most associated with her cult was the one river (Neiva) honored by the people of Braga and Fonte Arcada, coincidentally the first two Templar homes in Portugale, and obviously, the river Nabão in Tomar itself. This specific attraction by the Templars to the sanctity and purity of water harmonizes with John the Baptist’s teachings on the importance of ritual bathing and baptism.
The second attention the Templars paid to location was the siting beside or on top of ancient places of veneration. The preceptories at Paris, Gisors, and London, for example, were built on Roman chapels above earlier Druid temples, even Neolithic stone circles. They followed the same practice in Portugal, as their chosen sites show:
Loures. Church dedicated to Notre Dame built on the ruins of an early Celtic temple.
Ceras. Named after the goddess of fertility, site of an ancient temple honored by the Lusitanians.5
Castelo de Bode. The “castle of the goat,” associated with the pagan cult of Proserpina, daughter of Ceres, whose ritual is associated with springtime, hence the root of the word proserpere, “to emerge,” with respect to the ripening of the seed.
Souré. Site of former monastery built with reused stones from a former Visigothic temple.6
Faria and Idanha-a-Nova. Both on Neolithic sacred sites.
Idanha-a-Velha, Braga, and Almourol. On temples dedicated to Venus and Isis.7
Pombal. On a pre–AD 200 chapel dedicated to the archangel Michael.8
Monsaraz. Hub of a metropolis of megalithic monuments.
Santa Maria de Feira. On the Lusitanian temple of Tueraeus-Lugo, and one of the earliest places taken by Afonso Henriques in 1128.
Castelo Branco. Already venerated in Neolithic times; the Templars built a church dedicated to Notre Dame above an underground chamber.
The list is extensive.
Such locations have a second major theme in common: they are known to coincide with the crossing points of the Earth’s natural streams of electromagnetic energy, what the ancients referred to as spirit roads. Many of these places even mark gravitational anomalies,9 and all ancient sacred sites, without exception, are founded on such hotspots.10
Simply put, the Earth’s telluric current is a kind of life force, a blending of the intertwined forces of electricity and magnetism. As the anthropologist William Howells attempted to classify it, “It was the basic force of nature through which everything was done . . . [its] comparison with electricity, or physical energy, is here inescapable. [It] was believed to be indestructible, although it might be dissipated by improper practices. . . . It flowed continuously from one thing to another and, since the cosmos was built on a dualistic idea, it flowed through heavenly things to earthbound things, just as though from a positive to negative pole.”11
When NASA scientists discovered magnetic energy spiraling like tubes linking the Earth to the sun—even employing the metaphysical term portals12—they essentially validated the ancient master geomancers and temple builders who sourced these very same flux events on the land because they were all too aware of their connection to territories far and beyond the confines of this physical sphere. The image the ancients chose to represent this elusive telluric force was the serpent or dragon, and it became a culturally shared archetype describing the energy’s winding behavior along its earthly course.
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p; The Egyptian Building Texts provide actual instructions for establishing a sacred space, the principal component being the “piercing of the snake,” which serves to root these currents to a desired spot.13 Typically, when a serpent motif is displayed in a temple it is an instruction that the telluric current passes through the site, it is the X that marks the spot.14 Neolithic temple builders did the same by placing standing stones wherever telluric currents flow. These monoliths sometimes depict a serpent wound around them; the standing stones of Portugal, the betilos (literally “house of God”), often have carved snakes rising from the bottom of these stone sentinels.
This serpent energy is a natural force that can be harnessed for all manner of beneficial purposes; in Chinese geomancy such dragons were never slain, rather their electrical energy was kept in the realm and utilized for all manner of shamanic purposes.15
In 1983 a comprehensive study was undertaken to validate the existence of this energy in sacred sites. Using a magnetometer, the Rollright stone circle in England became the test subject. It was discovered that telluric currents are drawn into the stone circle in a spiral pattern. The leading project scientist also noted how “the average intensity of the [geomagnetic] field within the circle was significantly lower than that measured outside, as if the stones acted as a shield.”16 Identical readings have been found at temples throughout Europe, Egypt, and India, where the Earth’s energy field appears to stretch around the sites like a protective membrane.17 Celebrated primordial mounds such as Saqqara, Karnak, Luxor, and the pyramids control the energy into an interior neutral zone in a manner that is beneficial to people. Identical energy hotspots exist in Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres.18
The idea that sacred places are encircled by a force field has been widely explored. Measurements reveal how the current running through the entrance of the sites is double the rate of the surrounding countryside, making them not just doorways but also entrances. The magnetic readings at temples die away at night to a far greater level than can be accounted for under natural circumstances, only to charge back at sunrise, with the ground current from the surrounding land attracted to the temple just as magnetic fluctuations within reach their maximum.19 The voltage and magnetic variations are related and follow the phenomenon known in physics as electric induction,20 leading to the realization that sacred places behave like concentrators of electromagnetic energy.21