The Templars and the Shroud of Christ

by Barbara Frale

  From legend to politics

  Maybe the scientific knowledge that had allowed the great cathedrals to be built was the same with which the legendary Phoenician architect Hiram had constructed in Jerusalem the most celebrated building in all of history, the Temple of Solomon. The temple was not only a colossal piece of architecture, it was the holy place built to contain the Arcane Presence, the Living God, and as such was not supposed to be touched except by the hands of those initiated into the highest mysteries. It was imagined that Hiram’s ancient teachings had reached the European Middle Ages at a particular time, when the westerners had reached Jerusalem with the First Crusade (1095-1099), establishing a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land. And the history of the Middle Ages and of the crusades in the Holy Land featured a particular presence that had even drawn its name from that of Solomon’s Temple: the Militia Salomonica Templi, better known as the Order of Templars. Founded in Jerusalem, immediately after the First Crusade, to defend pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Templars had experienced a practically unstoppable growth, that had made it, barely 50 years after its foundation, the most powerful military religious order in the Middle Ages; until it had been overwhelmed, about two centuries later, by a mysterious and grim affair of heresy and dark magic that had ended with the death by burning of its last Grand Master.[2]

  Celebrated intellectuals of the time, such as Dante Alighieri, had accused the Templar trial, without mincing their words, of being essentially a monumental frame-up ordered by the French King Philip IV the Fair who wished to take over the order’s patrimony, most of which lay in French territory. But already in the 16th century, some lovers of magic such as the philosopher Cornelius Agrippa had raised the possibility that the order might practice strange and hidden rites, rites celebrated by the dim light of candles, where mysterious idols and even black cats would appear.[3]

  There was no clear idea of what role the Pope, then the Gascon Clemens V (1305-1314) had played in the affair. This man seemed ever hesitant, ever supine before royal will; and yet he had dragged on the trial of the Templars over no less than seven years, practically until his death, which took place only a month after that of the last Templar Grand Master. Many sources now readily accessible were then unknown, but even those that were known were studied with methods wholly different from today’s.

  History was treated as a literary endeavour, or a pastime meant to entertain and to enlighten the spirit. Therefore facts were selected from the past according to whether any moral teaching could be got from them, or whether they could stimulate the imagination like an adventure novel.

  What was known of this Pontiff, whose lay name was Bertrand de Got, was that he had been born in France, that he had started the Papal exile in Avignon and that he had released Guillaume de Nogaret – the true “evil spirit” of Philip’s reign, whom the King used for his most shameless actions – from excommunication. The King of France had been victorious in every confrontation with papal authority and even in the matter of the Templars’ trial, many facts seemed to indicate that the Church had easily bent to the sovereign demands. But there was another fact that made minds lean towards this idea, a fact that had nothing to do with historical studies proper, but could have a major effect. The Church’s attitude in the early 1700s was hugely cautious towards the aggressively rising new Enlightenment ideas; ideas that intended to promote a renewal of thought and of many social dynamics. At the root of this rejection lay several factors. Many of the high prelates who had leading roles in the hierarchy came from the same noble houses that managed secular power, and had a similar mentality and the same way of looking at the world. The Church had always been exempt from the social conditions that dominated the centuries, in the sense that it was possible to reach the height of spiritual and temporal power with one’s own natural qualities, however humble one’s origins. Many of the most famous Popes were from decidedly poor families; we just have to think of the legendary Gregory VII, who as a child had had to work as a porter, or the recent John XXIII, who came from a large peasant family who were not always certain where the next meal would come from. This, at least, was the theory, since in fact things were often very different: the immense patrimonies connected with so many church positions made them very desirable prey for the nobility, who, by placing their younger sons within the hierarchy, could insure a privileged life for them without making a dent in the family capital. The highest point of corruption in this sense had taken place in the Renaissance, when it had become the practice to actually sell the most important posts, such as bishoprics, the richest abbotships and the title of Cardinal.[4]

  The scandals, and the impossibility of swiftly reforming such customs, had raised political as well as religious protests, and had resulted in the Protestant schism. At the beginning of the 1700s, no less than two centuries after Luther’s protest, the violent polemics raised by Protestant thought in the 1500s and 1600s had hardly died down. The Papacy was accused of having trapped mankind in a network of inventions set up for its own advantage, built upon the only real weave of Christian doctrine – the primitive Church. A school of historical studies had been set up in Magdeburg in Germany for the purpose of showing up the whole endless queue of falsehoods that were believed to have been piled up by the Catholic Church over 1,000 years for the sole purpose of bending the faithful to its own material interests. Its members, called the Centuriators of Magdeburg from the name of their published works (The Centuries) had indubitable intellectual qualities, and even if they had stuffed their writings with considerable amounts of imagination, they gave plenty of trouble to generations of Catholic scholars.[5]

  In short, the wounds opened by Luther’s mighty schism were far from closed, and any innovation that seemed to place the well–established and reassuring Catholic tradition of thought in any doubt seemed the flag of yet another onslaught. Galileo Galilei had been among the most illustrious victims of this reaction. The tendency quickly established itself to see the Church as an ally of that oppressive secular power that needed to be overthrown, and several Freemason groups took a strongly anti-clerical tinge that they had not had at their start. From the idea that reason was the favoured, if not the only way to improve human life, there developed progressively a near-divine concept of intellect itself: reason as the spark of divinity entrusted to man by God. God himself was pure reason, praised as the Grand Architect who had built the universe. The mysteries whereby the highest builder had raised the cosmos called back to mind those by which another architect of legend, Hiram of Phoenicia, had built the Temple in the Holy City Jerusalem. Solomon, to whom divine wisdom had granted measureless wealth, had raised the temple, and the temple brought back to mind the Templars, also destroyed because they owned fabulous wealth, and possibly – everything seemed to prove it – possessors of Hiram’s secrets. That same Catholic Church that seemed then to be in the way of any progress however small was nothing else but the heir of the mediaeval Papacy; an institution that had covered up for centuries the fragile bases of its historical claims by unleashing its most terrible weapon, the Inquisition, against those who held the proofs that could unmask it.

  All these diverse ideas, born independently of each other but within the same context, ended up merging, and their outlines adapted till they fitted each other like the pieces of a complicated picture puzzle. From simple victims of raison d’etat and of Clemens V’s political weakness, the Templars became bit by bit the unlucky heroes of a wisdom many thousands of years old, older and higher than Christianity, that could have spread progress and social welfare, but had been sacrificed to destroy the unjust privileges of an institution everlastingly allied with absolute power and its manifold abuses. Templarism, that is a highly-coloured, romantic view of the old order, projected in the social reality of the 1700s, became so compulsively fascinating a phenomenon as to take a protagonist’s role in the history of European popular culture; but there were serious differences in the shape taken by the
phenomenon in different countries. If in France the Templars appeared as champions of free thought against the oppression of the twin dinosaurs of the ancient regime – Crown and Church – in Germany to the contrary studies on the Templars were promoted exactly to strike at those very radical and subversive groups whom they inspired.

  Prince von Metternich, the leader of the reaction against the upsets caused by Napoleon all over Europe, had started a cultural policy intended to destroy the credibility of the contemporary Freemason and neo-Templar groups. The intention was to prove that those heroic brethren of a secret order from which the French and the Revolution were proud to be derived, were in fact nothing but a bunch of heretics and perverts, the enemies of God, of the Church, of the State.

  From champions of free thought and guardians of sublime knowledge as they had been in France and England, the Templars became in Austria the stronghold of the most unyielding heresy. Napoleon probably was aware of this political exploitation of the legend, and if he was, that must have increased his interest.[6]

  About the Baphomet, and other demons

  In the same year as the French Emperor was to write his review of François Raynouard’s none too brilliant tragedy on the Templars, the London publishers Bulmer & Cleveland published a book by Joseph Hammer (later Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall), called Ancient alphabets and Hieroglyphic characters explained, with an account of the Egyptian priests. The author was a young Austrian scholar from the town of Graz in Steyermark, who had joined the diplomatic service in 1796 and three years later had become a member of an embassy to Constantinople. He was later to take part in several British expeditions against Napoleon in the Middle East, meanwhile studying the ancient civilizations and travelling widely. This intense research, and the remarkable openness of his mind, would lead him to become over the next 50 years one of the greatest oriental scholars of his time, author among other things of a textbook on the history of the Ottoman Empire which is recognised as the first significant treatment of a previously unexplored field. In 1847-1849 he was to crown his career by becoming chairman of the immensely prestigious Austrian Academy of Sciences, which was to count among its members such figures as Christian Doppler and Konrad Lorenz.[7] What he had printed in 1806 were his first experiences of research; and, possibly to support the wishes of his mighty patron Metternich, and surely under the influence of the “black legend” of the Templars in his time, he placed in this review of ancient scripts a hypothesis born from mere similarity in sound, which would however rouse great shock and interest. Hammer-Purgstall had in fact identified a word written in hieroglyphics, which in his reading sounded like Bahúmíd, and which, if translated into Arabic, meant “calf”.

  Today we can reconstruct his work’s development, and these scholar’s oddities acquire a logical explanation. We do in fact find that some witnesses, not members of the Order, who testified in the trial of the Templars in England, had mentioned strange rumours according to which the Templars kept an idol in the shape of a calf. Furthermore, some testimonies in the trial carried out in southern France featured that strange name, Baphomet, which made such an impression on Hammer-Purgstall, because it seemed to approximate his mysterious word. These few witnesses of obscure notions are at most ten or so, and are really a droplet in the over one thousand testimonies (affidavits) still preserved today from the Templar trials, in most of which neither fiends nor calves appear. But the 19th century scholar, drawn by the romantic taste of his time and by a really quite unscientific research method, fell victim in good faith to the magnetic fascination of an idea: he paid no attention to proportion, only saw the tiny amount of descriptions with their disquieting details, and forgot a whole world of much more reliable and rational confessions. And, to the pleasure of Prince von Metternich, he designed for the Templars an exoteric and decidedly grim aspect.[8]

  The pieces of the mosaic struck him as fitting each other perfectly, and the pull of the idea drove him further into his investigations. But it was only in 1818, after Waterloo and Napoleon’s exile in St. Helena, after the Congress of Vienna and the dawn of Restauration, that Hammer-Purgstall’s theories started taking a mature shape; and they did so by heftily drawing from other sources. In that year he published the work fated to achieve the highest fame in this area, whose eloquent title was Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum – The Mystery of Baphomet; Revealed. The author gave up his former belief that the Templar idol’s strange name came from an ancient hieroglyphic term, and embraced a more complex theory: the word was no longer from the Egyptian language, but was a compound of two Greek terms joined to mean a “baptism of the spirit”. He claimed that it proved that the Templars had inherited from antiquity, through the Cathar heretics of south France, the doctrines of the ancient Ophite sect. The latter took their name from the special cult they offered to the snake (Greek Ophis) from the Biblical book of Genesis. To them, the God of the Bible was not the principle of good but of evil, who out of petty jealousy had kept man in a condition of ignorance; and it had been the snake who was not the enemy, but the friend of humankind, to reveal the path of truth, that is, to gnosis (Greek for “knowledge”), divine knowledge.[9]

  This was the primeval religion, the most ancient one known; it always survived in the shadows with its secrets, escaping down the millennia the persecutions of the Church and of the various powers that relied on it. One of the worst charges the King of France had thrown against the Templars was that they forced their novices to deny Jesus and spit on the Cross; this could be matched with an information from Origen (who had lived in the early 3rd century AD) that the Ophites forced their new members to blaspheme Jesus.

  Shortly after the publication of Hammer-Purgstall’s theories, it happened that the Duke of Blacas, a famous collector of exoteric-type objects, found as if by magic two extremely strange little caskets supposedly dated to the Middle Ages and representing some sort of devil-cult. The Baphomet received at that point the public consecration and the henceforth famous shape that none of the Templar sources, rare and mutually contradictory as they were, ever could grant. It was depicted as a kind of devil with the horns and legs of a ram, the breasts of a woman and the genitals of a man.[10] The brilliant and dishonest occultist Eliphas Levi rediscovered these fascinating fakes in the late 1800s, finding material in them that was most useful to his speculations; and he dressed the ill-defined Baphomet in that threatening devilish majesty in which he towers to this day in so many fantasy pictures. Fans of the occult are free to believe what they wish, but historical evidence leaves no reasonable doubt but that Baphomet is nothing but an ugly doll invented – neither more nor less – by romantic fantasy, and still in use to this day to profitably catch the simple.[11]

  The truth about the “Mysterious idol of the Templars” must be sought in a wholly different direction.

  Paper secrets

  Although his writings sounded like genuine revelations at the time, Hammer-Purgstall had invented very little, and the bulk of his content was anything but of his own making. The idea that the Templars were the secret guardians of a most ancient religious wisdom had already been proposed some 20 years earlier, in a less extensive form, by the German book dealer Christian Friedrich Nicolai. Nicolai owned a tavern in Berlin that was a favourite meeting place for intellectuals. Among them, a personal friend of Nicolai’s called Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, possibly the most outstanding personality in German Enlightenment.[12]

  In 1778, Lessing had written a genuinely explosive book. It was a part of a much larger text written years earlier by Samuel Reimarus, professor of Oriental languages, and bore the provocative title: An Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God. Its original author had kept it secret; now Lessing published it posthumously with the more reassuring title: The Goals of Jesus and His Disciples – another fragment from the Anonymous of Wolfenbüttel. Reimarus argued that Jesus had nothing divine about him; his activity would have been simply that of a political Messiah, a kind
of patriot leader who wanted to free the Jews from Roman rule. When he died, his disciples refused to accept the facts and decided to steal the body, and went on to invent the news that he had risen, eventually founding a new religion. Samuel Reimarus was the first member of Western Christian culture to separate Jesus from the Christ, terms that had for so many centuries meant one and the same thing. That moment marks the start of the “quest for the historical Jesus”, a new direction in research, intended to reconstruct the historical visage of Jesus beyond what was held to have been invented by the Catholic Church with its dogmas; while before then there had only been a Christology, that is the study of the life of Jesus in the light of theology and the Gospels.[13] Both Lessing and Nicolai inclined to what used to be called “rational Christianity”, something very close to Deist philosophy, which substantially denied the divinity of the Christ to assert the existence of a single and sole creator God, the rational principle of absolute goodness and the origin of all things. Some radical circles reached the conviction that Church and Papacy had stubbornly and dishonestly hidden a frightening truth for no better reason than to ennoble their historically dubious origins, placing them within God himself. And the strongly reactionary attitude of some Catholic areas, clinging to total denial, strengthened their opponents’ belief that they had something to hide.