As a result of his reputation, John was also associated with the so-called “desert fathers”: men such as St. Antony, the demon-haunted hermit who established desert life as an ideal in Egypt in the third century, thus inadvertently generating the practice of Christian monasticism, the life of self-denial or asceticism, that is, training.
At the twelfth-century Chapel and Hospital of St. John the Baptist in Lichfield, England, for example, the hospital sign today features a tau cross (like a “T”), representing the Baptist. This is not a normal sign associated with John. I long wondered if it was the cross with its “head,” as it were, removed, since John was traditionally beheaded.
A little research suggested that the symbol may have derived from involvement with the Franciscan friary next door to the hospital. The Franciscan friary was just inside the “barrs” or gates of Lichfield; the Hospital of St. John the Baptist was established “outside the Barrs”: just outside, in fact. Apart from a fear of disease, this position may also have been significant in assigning the Baptist’s patronage to the hospital: the world outside, the wilderness, the world of the itinerant and journeyman. Medieval masons were trade journeymen, not bound to place but free to travel: outsiders who made wildernesses bloom in stone as they journeyed from lodge to lodge and built the monasteries, cathedrals, castles, chapels, and bridges of the Middle Ages: St. John’s men.
The Hospital of St. John the Baptist in Lichfield also took pilgrims in at the gates of the city, offering shelter and beer. Pilgrims journeyed great distances to Lichfield to see the relics of St. Chad at the city’s cathedral inside its massive protective walls. There is a symbolic connection between the gates to the holy place and baptism, the “password” to salvation. As we shall see, John the Baptist was also linked to healing: the function of holy relics.
St. Francis of Assisi, spiritual father of the friary next door to the hospital, respected the desert fathers, especially St. Antony. St. Antony’s staff is usually represented as a “tau” (τ). Franciscans maintain that St. Francis took the tau as a special symbol for his brotherhood because he was impressed by a reading from Ezekiel 9:4–6 (see also Exodus 12:1):
Pass through the city [Jerusalem] and mark a tav [the Hebrew letter “T”] on the foreheads of those who moan and groan over all the abominations that are practiced within it. To the others I heard him say: “Pass through the city after them and strike! . . . Old men, youths and maidens, women and children, wipe them out. But do not touch anyone marked with the tav.”
The “tav” or “tau” is a sign of the saved, of the redeemed. And, of course, the outward symbol of redemption in the Christian religion has always been baptism. Through the Franciscans and the Order of St. Antony, the “tau cross” became linked to the establishment of hospitals, which were a kind of oasis in the desert of Christian suffering.
The twelfth-century Winchester Psalter contains an illustration of John baptizing Jesus while an angel waits on the riverbank, holding a garment drawn in the outline of a tau—the left and right arms of the “T” forming the sleeves. The garment symbolizes salvation, the “new life” given through baptism. The idea of rebirth is strongly implied, while the holy, healing waters of the Jordan symbolize life and hope flowing into the desert and the deserted.
John is often depicted carrying an image of the “Lamb of God” holding a flag with a red cross on it, the cross of sacrifice. This image derives from the Gospel of John (1:29): “The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’”
The idea of the “lamb” derives in part from Genesis (chapter 22) where Isaac asks his father, “Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” not knowing that his father, Abraham, has been told by God to sacrifice his son: he, Isaac, the son, is the intended offering. As a ram stands in for Isaac’s sacrifice, in God’s mercy, so the “lamb” that is the messiah will, according to John’s text, “take away” the sin that in accordance with God’s laws ought to condemn humankind to death. The “lamb” is also the lamb sacrificed at Passover in Egypt when the Lord “hovered over” or “guarded” the homes of those Hebrews whose lintels bore the tav, the sign of salvation from God’s judgment, made in the blood of the slaughtered lamb (see Exodus 12:3).
Since sickness and death were seen in medieval Europe to be rooted in human sin, so, in religious hospitals—there were no other kind—healing required sufferers to concentrate on the life-giving powers of the “Lamb of God.” John the Baptist pointed the sinner and the sick toward their redemption and healing. The first condition of healing in a religious establishment was, therefore, “Repent!” or turn around to God, let oneself go in faith: the traditional word uttered in the wilderness of parched hopes and spiritual clarity by John, whose hands carried the sinner beneath the healing or “living waters” to the life above them.
Further confirmation of the very personal association of John’s word to the fears and the healing of medieval men and women, whether bound to city or village, or at liberty to journey, may be found in some very rare “pendant capsules” discovered by chance in northern England and in the Netherlands. These precious capsules, just over an inch long, are tiny pendants fashioned in gold, precious jewels, and enamel. Originally opened to reveal some holy relic or healing substance, the pendant capsules were inscribed with painstakingly executed images of God the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Virgin Mary, St. Antony—and John the Baptist. One example found at Winteringham in North Lincolnshire is in the clear form of a tau cross: a clear call for protection on life’s journey from the judgment due to the sinner, and not the only example of its kind.
A diamond-shaped pendant capsule found at Middleham Castle, Yorkshire, dated ca. 1475–1485, has an inscription on the obverse edge that reads Ecce agnus dei qui tollis [sic] peccata [sic] mundi miserere nobis, followed by the words tetragrammaton ananyzapta. The first phrase is a Latin rendering of the words attributed in John’s Gospel to John the Baptist (John 1:29), “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world.” The words miserere nobis, “have mercy upon us,” are taken from the eucharistic liturgy and show that Christ’s sacrifice for the redemption of sinners is continued through the sacraments of the church where the sinner is pointed toward the “Lamb of God” or Agnus Dei. The figure of the Lamb of God, holding the red-cross pennant, is the symbol most associated with John the Baptist. It is clearly depicted below a Nativity scene on the reverse of the pendant. Perhaps the capsule once contained a wax wafer stamped with the Agnus Dei, which carried a papal blessing.
It is almost certain that the pendant would also have served as a magical amulet, to ward off evil powers. It features a sapphire, symbol of the pure soul, traditional protector from peril of poisoning or blindness. The reference to the “tetragrammaton” (the four Hebrew letters of God’s name) followed by the word ananyzapta demonstrates the pendant’s magical value. We know from magical texts of the period that the word ananyzapta or ananyzaptus was widely repeated as an incantation against falling sickness or epilepsy. More prosaically, it was employed as an antidote to hangovers.
THE KNIGHTS HOSPITALLER
The most striking link between St. John the Baptist and the world of medieval medicine may be found amid the extensive activities of the Knights Hospitaller, sometimes called the Knights of St. John. Persisting to this day as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, based in Rome, the massive medieval organization was first founded in Jerusalem, whence it moved to Rhodes, then Malta.
In 1023, eighteen years after Muslim zealots destroyed a Christian hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem, a body of Italian merchants obtained Caliph Ali az-Zahir of Egypt’s permission to rebuild the hospital on the site of the monastery of St. John the Baptist. The site’s sacredness to John appears to explain the adoption of St. John’s patronage by the knightly order, which would run side by side with the monastic hospitaller order, founded after the first Crusade in 1113 by Gerard the Blessed. Gerard expanded his or
der throughout the new Norman Kingdom of Jerusalem, a program augmented by Raymond du Puy de Provence, his successor. Raymond established a new hospital adjacent to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. When the order began providing armed protection for pilgrims, there emerged a private army and health service combined. Because it attracted chivalry from all over the Western world, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa granted the expanding order a charter of privileges in 1185. Frederick received the blessings of the Baptist for his pledge of protection.
The Hospitallers have often been confused with the “Poor Knights of the Temple” or Knights Templar who appeared during the same period. The Templars wore a red cross on a white background. Initially distinguished by a black surcoat with a white cross, the Hospitallers adopted a red surcoat with a white cross with Pope Innocent IV’s approval in 1248. Complementary colors notwithstanding, Templars and Hospitallers remained institutional rivals, though their differences were glossed over by eighteenth-century Masonic apologists for “Templar-Masonry.” That the Templars were dedicated not to St. John but to St. Mary the Virgin, for example, was obscured. However, since the Hospitallers obtained much of the property, and some of the membership, of the Templars after that order’s suppression for unholy vice in 1312, it could be argued that there was a quasi-Templar persistense under the patronage of St. John. If Hospitallers in their priories ever wondered at the time whether St. John had redeemed the sins of the Templar knight sinners by extending his care to their collective goods, we know nothing of it.
Where the Rev. James Anderson in London in 1738 supposed that the knightly orders owed their origin to “Masonry” (they had “Grand Masters”–built castles, chapels, and churches and were monastic orders), the pro-Jacobite, romantic Freemason Chevalier Ramsay had declared au contraire from Paris the previous year of (1737), that the real Masonic Order was actually derived from the medieval knightly orders (Templars and Hospitallers being implied), whose precepts of chivalry should govern a revived, and almost certainly pro-Jacobite, Masonry. Ramsay’s “Oration” would in due course germinate that “Templar Masonry” whose “Knight-Masons” are still with us, albeit strangers to the Middle Ages.
Indeed, all of this eighteenth-century romancing and infra-Masonic pugnacity and one-upmanship was remote from the experience of medieval freestone masons and all of the other, and no less proud, trades and walks of life, for whom the dramatic—and even jovial—figure of St. John the Baptist was close.
Taking St. John the Baptist as one’s patron saint in the days before the Reformation carried myriad blessings. The old freestone masons in their guilds, congregations, and chapters were hardly alone in desiring the Baptist’s patronage. Nevertheless, the fact remains that all we know for sure about pre-eighteenth-century relations between St. John the Baptist and British freemasons, whether “admitted” persons from genteel backgrounds or associated trades, or working master masons and their companies, is that the Midsummer Feast of St. John the Baptist was important to them. For how long this had been so, or whether other saints days, including that of St. John the Evangelist, meant much to them, we do not know. (St. John Evangelist was patron saint of Edinburgh Stonemasons.) However, since Midsummer festivities were popular throughout Britain and the continent of Europe, we can hardly suppose that freestone masons or “freemasons”—as masons of freestone were called from at least the end of the thirteenth century—made a point of absenting themselves from the general enjoyment. The question of precisely what masons as masons saw in the Baptist can only, in truth, be speculated on, though, as we shall see further, there was much resonance between the symbolic figure of John the Baptist and what we know of Masonic ideals, though, in written form, from considerably later in history.
After all the emphasis on hospitals, sickness, Saracens, and salvation, it comes as a relief to know that St. John was probably most associated with the happy, joyous side of life in its naturalness, as well as, if not more than, the deeper meaning of it all.
Before the continental Reformation blew up the Western Christian Church, June 24 was marked in Britain by the appearance of pulpits in the open air, decorated with boughs and green candles. Fires were lit in the open, accompanied, said critics, by “heathen rejoicing.” We can be certain that the guardians of Hanoverian harmony would not have liked that.
Not only were ordinary folk caught up in sexy, Midsummer frolics of the Carmina Burana kind, whole regions and institutions in Europe had cause to celebrate. The Baptist was the patron of Burgundy, Malta, and Provence. He was patron saint of Florence and Amiens, as well as of weavers, tailors, tanners, shepherds, furriers, and of brotherhoods to support the condemned (John had been imprisoned and executed). There were relics of St. John’s head in St. Silvestro in Rome (ca. 1400), Maastricht, Quarante, Montpellier (ca. 1440), St. Johann in Aachen-Burtscheid, and St. Bavo in Ghent (built on a tenth-century chapel of St. John the Baptist). John’s relics could look forward to an outing for public veneration on the saint’s day.
Midsummer Eve was a day of blessing, a lucky day, especially for suckling babes who, weaned on that day, could look forward to a life on the sunshine side; Midsummer was a good time to get married, to conceive a child, to roll sparse-clad on the ground, or to participate, discreetly, in magic rites of fertility and purification. In the German town of Leobschutz in Silesia, John himself blessed the flowers picked in his honor on Midsummer Eve; in Bohemia, a prayer was said to John as “his” flowers were picked before being mixed with animal fodder, while a baby baptized on St. John’s Day in the region was more blessed than if the infant had received a thousand thalers.*1 St. John’s Day was a good day for reconciliation of folk in conflict.
A good time was had by all; John’s band was a happy band.
HERALD OF THE HARVEST
Why had John the Baptist been chosen by the church to rule over the summer solstice, our closest brush with the sun? Was it only to Christianize pagan solstice feasting and frolicking?
Let us see.
The solstice coincides with what used to be called the “honey moon,” the origin of our costly nuptial abandon. The time of the honey moon was the best time to harvest honey. A marble figure attributed to Michelangelo’s workshop, now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, depicts a youthful John the Baptist gracefully gazing at a honeycomb held in his left hand (an allusion to John’s wild honey diet; Mark 1:6). One wonders if this Midsummer link to honey may have informed the traditional idea of Masons as “busy bees.” As we have seen, Midsummer was a favored time both for marriage and for birth.
If we look carefully at the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, we see that John the Baptist is explicitly presented there as the herald of the harvest—though John points to no ordinary harvest:
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: And think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree, which bringeth forth not good fruit, is hewn down and cast into the fire.
I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire.
Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner: but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. (Matthew 3:7–12)
In the ancient East, midsummer marked the time when Tammuz, the comely vegetation god, would be cut as the wheat was reaped and women would weep for Tammuz’s separation from his consort Astarte or Ishtar, Venus, the Morning Star of Love, the dawning light in the fields—symbolized in Masonry as the star of hope.
It is undoubtedly significant then that the “spring” wheat harvest in Israel takes place
in the third sacred month, Sivan, from May to June, when the Feast of Weeks or Hag Hashavuot is celebrated: called “Weeks” because it occurs seven weeks after Passover. Christians celebrate “Pentecost” as the time of the coming on the apostles of the Holy Spirit, but “Pentecost” refers originally to the Feast of Weeks, being the fiftieth day (from the Greek pentēcostē) from the 14th Nisan, the beginning of Passover. Pentecost is also known as Hag Hakatzir, the “Feast of Harvest.” Most striking is the name Yom Habikkurim, also given to the feast. It means “the Day of the First Fruits,” marking the appearance of the first fruits of the summer harvest (see Numbers 28:26).
Leviticus 23:14 ruled that the children of Israel could not enjoy their harvest until the first fruits had been dedicated to God in gratitude for saving the people. At the time of John the Baptist, the Feast of Weeks was a major festival requiring every covenanted man in the land to visit the Temple in Jerusalem. There the wheat offering would be made in the form of two loaves of leavened bread shown to the assembled in a priestly ritual. An act of atonement was made. Vicarious offering of lambs, bulls, and rams emphasized that an innocent victim was required to remove sin from the people. Sin was a “quantity,” and it had to be seen to go somewhere to render the covenanted pure before the Lord. The need for blood is made clear in Leviticus 17:11, “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”
Suddenly, we can see what the historical John the Baptist meant by his attack on his country’s religious leaders. We can also see another reason why John’s birthday was placed at the auspicious time of Midsummer. John summoned his hearers to offer “fruits meet for repentance.” God wanted a first fruits feast-offering not merely of symbolic grain and the blood of dumb animals, but of the living hearts of his people.
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 4