First Templar Nation

by Freddy Silva

  Meanwhile in Portugal, time passed, and the next Templar Master also ascended the throne, as King Manuel I. One of his first instructions was to commission a fellow knight of the Order of Christ, the explorer Vasco da Gama, to sail his four ships eastward. After disembarking in Mozambique, a member of da Gama’s crew wrote the following entry in his journal: “We were told that Presbyter John resided not far from this place . . . far in the interior, and could only be reached on the backs of camels.” News that the Portuguese finally and safely reached their goal came in the form of a letter from Queen Eleni of Ethiopia to King Manuel I in 1509. She followed up with an ambassador from her court, who conveyed a second letter suggesting, among other items, marriages between princes and princesses of the Ethiopian court with members of the Order of Avis, the offshoot Templar Order.

  King Manuel encouragingly replied by sending the Ethiopians the most unusual of items: an extensive library of one thousand books, and a printing press—significant in that it would be the first one outside of Europe to be free of the Vatican’s censorship. The Portuguese king also sent a token army of 450 men under the command of Dom Cristovão (another knight of the Order of Christ and the son of Vasco da Gama) to assist the court of the Ethiopian king. At one point this small contingent faced ten thousand spearmen and, against all odds, won. The Portuguese stayed long enough to build a stone bridge, the first of its kind, across the Nile, as well as several stone churches and castles.17

  It was tradition for the king of Ethiopia never to show himself to his people except veiled behind silk muslins, yet eventually the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvarez of Coimbra did get to see Presbyter John: “We dressed ourselves and arranged ourselves very well . . . and many people came to accompany us on foot and on horseback, so we went in order from the place we started from as far as a great portal, where we saw innumerable pavilions and tents pitched like a city in a great plain.”18 Alvarez described him as “a young man, not very black. His complexion might be chestnut and bay, not very dark in color.”19

  Presbyter John wrote several letters to the Portuguese king in which he addressed himself as “son of Solomon, son of the Pillar of Sion . . . son of the Hand of Mary.”20 The bundle was tied up, placed in a small brocaded bag, and packed in a leather-lined basket ready for Alvarez to bring back to Portugal, along with the presbyter’s gift of his own crown made of gold and silver. Alvarez himself was awarded thirty ounces of gold for his efforts, and on February 12, 1521, together with fellow Portuguese travelers, he began to make his way back home.

  The Portuguese were forced to wait a whole year before favorable winds in the Red Sea allowed their ship to leave, so Alvarez took the opportunity to attend the sacred places. He noted many hermitages where holy men passed their lives in a state of privation. He also visited the extraordinary rock-carved churches at Lalibela, eleven of them. The most striking, Beta Giorghis, was carved into the bedrock itself. “I weary of writing more about those buildings, because it seems to me that I shall not be believed if I write more, and because regarding what I have already written they may blame me for untruth. Therefore I swear by God, in whose power I am, that all I have written is the truth . . . and there is more than what I have written, and I have left it that they may not tax me with it being falsehood, so great was my desire to make known this splendour to the world.”21

  Beta Ghiorghis.

  Alvarez’s astonishment was understandable. The structure descended forty feet below ground, and the remaining freestanding cube of volcanic tuff was then hollowed externally and internally in the shape of a cross. “A double cross,” Alvarez noted, “that is, one within the other, like the crosses of the Order of Christ.”22

  The priest asked his sources who had been responsible for this outstanding masonic craft, to which they replied, “They were made by white men.”23

  The Knights Templar had carved them in the twelfth century.

  51

  PRESENT ERA. AKSUM. A FEAST DAY WHEN THE TABOTAT ARE SEEN IN DAYLIGHT . . .

  The church of Our Lady Mary of Sion in Aksum claims to house the Tabota Zion, the Ethiopian name for the Ark of the Covenant.1 Copies of the Ark, or tabot, reside throughout other Coptic churches, particularly in the Lake Tana region, where the churches were built in circular fashion. The tabot spend much of the year resting behind a curtain of veils inside their inner sanctum. But for one special day their contents are brought out of the churches during Timkat, a feast celebrating the rite of baptism.

  The feast of Timkat is referenced in the Bible and is still practiced throughout Ethiopia by black Jews who honor the Old Testament traditions, independent of later Judaism. During the celebrations the priests balance on their heads a stone tablet called a tabotat, a copy of the tablets contained within the Ark.2 These tabotat resemble trays, about fifteen inches square, each draped with a cloth embroidered with the emblem of a dove.

  The ritual bears an uncanny similarity to an old Egyptian ceremony, the Festival of Apep, that took place in ancient times in a township by the Nile called Thebes, which back then was formerly called Tapet,3 a word sharing linguistic similarities with tabot. In this ceremony a miniature boat was carried on staves between the temples of Luxor and Karnak. The boat was curved much like the crescent moon, symbol of the god of wisdom, Djehuti; at its center rested a box-like repository inside of which was placed a sacred stone or veiled statues of gods made of stone.4 One scholar says of the connection between the ceremonial stone objects and the Ark, “The tradition of two sacred stone tablets within the Ark would point strongly to the conclusion that the original contents of the Ark must have been sacred stone . . . [which] was either conceived of as the deity himself, or as the object in which the deity was thought to reside permanently.”5

  The original Ark would have passed through Thebes on its exodus from Jerusalem to Ethiopia, because its custodians built a temple to protect it on the island of Elephantine, to the south of Thebes.6

  It would seem that Thebes is named for a celebration of the Ark, the memory of which was preserved in the form of a local folk tradition, while the event itself is depicted on the walls of the temple of Luxor.

  Although no such mural exists in Tomar, its Feast of Tabuleiros records the memory of an event. Whether the Templars brought a copy of the Ark to Tomar is not possible to prove, but the remarkable thing is how an etymological trail connects these stories.

  Linguistically, tabot descends from the Hebrew word tebah via the Aramaic tebuta, which refers to a container.7 Portuguese is a language rich in characteristics that reflect the myriad of peoples who settled in Portugal, such as Arabs, Jews, Egyptians, and particularly Phoenicians, whose language shares many common traits with Aramaic and old Hebrew. The Phoenician word thabilitho (a wooden slab), is also the origin of the Portuguese word tabuleiro; its variant, tablete, literally means “a tablet.”

  Its first syllables, tabu, mean “something that is designated as sacred, set apart, or denoted as restricted.” Thus, the Feast of Tabuleiros in Tomar can be accurately described as “the feast of a tray on which rests a restricted holy or sacred object.”

  The Feast of Tabuleiros in Tomar, during which women parade through town balancing a tabuleiro, a tall vertical shaft bearing thirty loaves of bread.

  The visual symbolism of the Feast of the Tabuleiros bears an uncanny resemblance to the stella of Amun and the two oversized tablets of wisdom that make up his crown.

  52

  PRESENT ERA. TOMAR. STARING AT THE ROTUNDA . . .

  The Templars may have once deposited something of great spiritual importance in Tomar after all, something associated with the Ark of the Covenant or its contents. And just like the cryptic phrase carved beside the image of the Ark on the Door of Initiates in Chartres cathedral, its exact location in Tomar, like its nature, remains elusive, while its inviolable halo has been kept alive by way of a folk tradition.

  What struck me most about Francisco Alvarez’s eyewitness account from Ethiopia is not so
much the record of advanced construction techniques the Templars employed in their churches in Ethiopia—which no modern expert has solved, by the way—but the description of the labyrinth of tunnels, crypts, and galleries connected to the churches and used for religious purposes, all of which seamlessly resonates with the Regaleira estate in Sintra, already a sacred place by the time Master Gualdino Paes inherited it on behalf of the Templars.

  Perhaps Sintra’s maze of tunnels and the two mysterious shafts are an imprint of methods the Templars learned abroad, possibly implemented by the Templar Master based on knowledge and experiences acquired during his years of preparation in the Holy Land.

  Like the secrets of the Mysteries, the absolute truth remains obscured by veils.

  As for the actual secrets for “raising the dead,” that “law so extraordinary on which such a secret should be kept,” they too remain occulted (hidden from the eye), appearing here and there in ripples and echoes like a benevolent ghost. What is certain is that, in the end, the Templars were protecting the pilgrim trail after all. Not in its literal sense but in the manner in which they guarded the path for every inquiring journeyman wishing to come into contact with the Mysteries, the path to personal revelation that opens a metaphorical door to the kingdom of heaven.

  To paradise.

  53

  PRESENT ERA. A CIRCULAR HALL IN A SMALL COUNTRY NAMED PORTUGAL . . .

  Once upon a time, the kingdom known as Portugal was called Lusitania. The name is an amalgam of lux (light) and Tanit,1 a Phoenician lunar goddess and divine virgin equated with Isis. Her emblem is a fusion of the Egyptian symbol of eternal life—the ankh—and an isosceles triangle beneath a crescent moon.2

  In its Latin form, lux tanit means “a storehouse of light” or “a place of concealment.”3 Lusitania, then, is “a place where the knowledge (light) is stored or concealed.” In the medieval legend, the Graal is described as a gold object carried on a salver, a silver tray used in a formal ceremony. It is similar to the Portuguese root word salvar (to save) from which arises the term salvation. And salvation by imbibing the knowledge contained in the Graal—the Sophia, that beautiful woman of knowledge—adequately describes the Templar quest.

  In Tomar, the Templars could have named their circular “church” the rotunda. The same word exists in Portuguese, even carries the same meaning. But they did not. Instead, they named it something else—charola, an unusual choice of word to ascribe a building, for it literally translates as “a salver.”

  Who would have thought it, the rotunda is the resting place for the Graal?

  And by creating a kingdom within a kingdom and erecting this salver in the town whose name means “to drink,” the Templars provided a safe haven where one could imbibe the Graal, through a secret ritual, to experience that ultimate of journeys: the discovery of the nature of reality and the self, a timeless experience once given its own unique symbol, the cup of everlasting life.

  END

  EPILOGUE

  LUSITANIA. WHERE KNOWLEDGE IS STORED, GUARDED BY A GODDESS WHOSE SYMBOL IS A TRIANGLE . . .

  Just how wide did the Templar plan in Portugal extend? Consider the following connections . . .

  In her grant of 1139, Eleanor of Aquitaine gave the Knights Templar a building and a mill in the western French port town of La Rochelle, “entirely free and quit of all custom, infraction, and tolte and taille [levies] and the violence of all officials, except for our toll.” She suggested her vassals make similar donations. More importantly, she granted the Templars freedom to transport anything through her lands “freely and securely without all customs and all exactions.”1

  Almost two hundred years later, this foresight would save the lives of countless knights and ensure the survival of the Order of the Temple beyond the borders of France and the grasp of Pope Clement V. That was the eve of Friday, October 13, 1307. A statement by a Templar named Jean de Chalon declares that three carts containing the Templar treasure (gold and documents) left the Paris temple that evening following a tip-off that the king’s henchmen were out to arrest all members of the Order. The intent was to move the contents of their preceptory to La Rochelle, where the Templars owned a fleet of large ships for the ferrying of passengers and cargo between Europe and the Mediterranean. However, by the time the carts reached the Templar castle at Gisors the roads were already under surveillance, so the contents were hidden in subterranean passages under the castle’s keep.

  The statement was obtained under torture and may have been a red herring. Nevertheless, a document associating Gisors with the Templar treasure was found in the Vatican library and obtained at the request of the French ambassador to Rome.2

  Eighteen ships filled up with fleeing Templars at La Rochelle while other knights made their way down the Seine (a river from which they were exempt from tolls and thus not subject to search) to the port of Le Havre. Once loaded, the ships sailed into the Bay of Biscay and disappeared from all documented history. It is a notable omission given how such a considerable fleet would have been of significant value.

  In truth the fleet split into two. One arm sailed west to Portugal,3 making good use of the water routes made available since the days of 1125 when the Templars used the estuary of the Mondego to reach the castle of Souré.4 Upon reaching Portugal, to ensure anonymity, they disembarked at a small fishing village on a peninsula near Serra d’El Rei. Some of the ships’ names were Temple Rose, Great Adventure, and Falcon of the Temple (a salute to the god Horus, son of the resurrected Osiris).5 It is rumored that part of a treasure was offloaded here and transported to nearby Obidos, a town patronized by the queens of Portugal.6 The remaining ships and their cargo continued down the coast to Lisbon. The river Tejo was navigable in those days all the way to Spain, as were many of its tributaries, one being the Nabão, which leads right onto the quay opposite the Arab waterwheel in Tomar.

  Meanwhile, the second fleet sailed north to Scottish Templar strongholds in Kilmartin, Kilmory, and Castle Sweet. Essentially, the Templars took up positions on the extreme points of Europe, from which the only rational place to expand was across the Atlantic.

  Framing the sunrise side of the town square of Tomar, the church of John the Baptist looks out over a pavement of large black-and-white checkerboard mosaics made of small cobblestones, as though the entire plaza is the center of a Masonic stage. And yet the play is real enough, for it was from here that the Knights Templar—as the rebranded Order of Christ—set out on bold maritime explorations that changed the world as we know it. This great work was conducted patiently and over the course of centuries, initially with the building of Europe’s first independent nation-state, then a kingdom within the kingdom of Portugal, and following the disbandment of the Order throughout Europe, a cooperation with brothers taking refuge in Scotland to resume an ongoing mission.

  Like all esoteric sects, the Templars were master geometers. If we recall, an axis runs through the rotunda, through two marked pillars in the church of John the Baptist, continuing as the crow flies to the abbey on Mount Sion. Could the Templars have applied the talisman of triangular geometry to a third notable landmark to form a geometric trinity?

  A number of shared similarities exist between events in Portugal and Scotland: the protection offered the Templars by King Dinis was similarly offered by his counterpart, King Robert the Bruce, who never legally ratified the dissolution of the Scottish temple;7 both countries’ move toward independence occurred in battles on the feast day of John the Baptist;8 the Templars in Portugal were renamed Order of Christ, and in Scotland, Scottish Rite Freemasonry. On the infamous night of October 13, Templar ships slipped out of French ports, split up, and sailed to these two respective safe havens.

  Following the Council of Troyes in 1128, the Templars under Prince Afonso Henriques set in motion a chain of events that led to Portuguese independence. As this was unfolding, Hugues de Payns was in Scotland meeting with King David I, who granted the Grand Master the chapelry and manor of Balantroda
ch, a small hamlet whose name means “stead of the warrior.” The land around Balantrodach had earlier been awarded as a gift of gratitude to William the Seemly, of the Sainte Clair family, for bravery and loyalty to the Scottish crown;9 his son Henri de Sainte Clair played an active role in the first Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem by King Malcolm.10

  The Sainte Clair family originated from Normandie, a county adjoining Flanders, the place of origin of a number of original Knights Templar; the Sainte Clairs were themselves linked by blood and marriage to the family of the Counts of Champagne and the Duke of Burgundy.11

  Hugues de Payns set up a preceptory at Balantrodach in 1129, to which was added a church and a Cistercian cloister and mill.*50 In essence, it became a focal center of operations for the Templars in Scotland. Contact between Scotland and Flanders became very active thanks to the partnership between King David and the Flemish comte Philippe d’Alsace, cousin of the Templar knight Payen de Mont-Didier;12 the king also surrounded himself with Templars and appointed them as “Guardians of his morals by day and night.”

  After the night of October 13, the Templars escaped to enclaves throughout Scotland, and in time amassed no less than 519 properties.13 They would have been fascinated to discover the Graal legends had become popular there too, not least because Celtic mythology is rife with quests by a group of chivalric warriors seeking a mysterious sacred object of mystifying power, along with a remote castle and a crippled king ruling over a land similarly fallen on hard times. In one of the original Graal stories—specifically the one written by Chrétien de Troyes—the Graal knights defend a castle guarding the gates “de Galvoie,” which is a specific reference to a real Scottish castle in Galloway, where the Bruce clan was seated after being made lords by King David I.14 Chrétien also makes a reference to a religious site at Mons Dolorosus, which at the time was the actual name of the Cistercian abbey of Melrose in Northumberland, where Robert the Bruce’s heart was buried.15