the stables attached to the Temple of Solomon.
Founded between the first and second Crusade, they became Christianity’s crack troops. The Knights Templar or the Order of the Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to give them their full title, always wore sheepskin breeches beneath their outer clothing as symbol of their chastity, and they were forbidden to cut their beards. They were to own nothing except a sword, holding all property in common. They were never to ask for mercy from the enemy, only retreating if the odds were three to one. And though they might retreat, they would always in the end have to fight to the death.
St Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian monastic order and the most influential churchman of the day, wrote the ‘order’, or rule book, of the Templars in 1128, so that they became, formally, a religious order. Bernard wrote of the Templars that they knew no fear, that ‘one of them has often put to flight a thousand’, that they were gentler than lambs, grimmer than lions, and theirs was ‘the mildness of monks and the valour of knights’.
The archaeological evidence seems to confirm that the Templars may have had an ulterior motive for their order — to excavate the site of the Temple. Templar artefacts have been discovered in tunnels deep below it. These tunnels have been cut out of solid rock in a direction that would have taken them directly under the supposed site of the Holy of Holies.
The initiation ceremonies of the Templars clearly brought together different traditions, including Sufism and the Solomonic wisdom of the Temple. A lamb was killed and from its body a cord was made and placed around the candidate’s neck. He was led into the initiation chamber by this cord. He had been made to swear that his intentions were completely pure, on pain of death, and now the candidate wondered if the Grand Master could see into his soul by occult means — was he about to die?
Candidates endured frightening ordeals of the type that candidates for initiation by Zarathustra had had to undergo, involving confrontations with dreadful demonic forces, so that they would be prepared to face death or any horrors they might encounter in their later lives.
These confrontations with demons in initiation would come back to haunt the Templars, but for about two hundred years their
Because many nobles joined the order, giving over rights to their property, the Templars became extremely rich. They invented letters of credit so that money could be transferred without risk of being stolen by robbers. Their Temple in Paris became the centre of French finances. They were in some ways the forerunners of banks, instrumental in preparing for the rise of the merchant classes. The Templars were also patrons of the first trade guilds to be independent of Church and nobility. Called the Compagnons du Devoir, these guilds were responsible for the Templars’ building projects, maintained ethical codes and protected members’ widows and orphans.
AT THE END OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY other challenges to the supremacy of the Church were arising.
In 1190-91 Richard the Lionheart, grandson of Guillaume of Poitiers, the first Troubador, was returning from the third Crusade. He stopped off to visit a mountain hermit, who was becoming famous for his gift of prophecy. The report came back with Richard: ‘What black tidings lie beneath that cowl!’
Born in a small village in Calabria in about 1135, Joachim had lived as a hermit for many years before joining an abbey and eventually founding his own Abbey of Fiore in the mountains.
He was trying to understand the Revelations of St John, wrestling with it, as he put it — and being defeated. Then one Easter morning he awoke a new man, having been granted a new faculty of understanding. The prophetic commentaries that then poured out of him would influence spiritual thought and mystical groups throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, and then later the Rosicrucians.
There is a cabalistic dimension to Joachim’s writings even though the central books of the Cabala had yet to be published, perhaps the result of his friendship with Petrus Alphonsi, a Spanish Jewish convert. Of course, the Old Testament itself has a strong sense of God working through history, but what is specifically cabalistic about Joachim’s thought is his interpretation of biblical texts in terms of complex number symbolism and his vision of what he called the Tree of Life. He published a diagram of this tree two hundred years before a similar idea was published by Cabalists, most likely drawing on oral tradition he encountered through his friendship with Alphonsi.
But the aspect of Joachim’s teaching that really grabbed the medieval imagination was his theory of three. He argued that if the Old Testament was the Age of the Father, which had called for fear and obedience, and if the New Testament was the Age of the Son, the age of the Church and of faith, then the reality of the Trinity suggests that a third age is coming, an age of the Holy Spirit. Then the Church will no longer be necessary, because this will be an age of freedom and love. Because Joachim was an initiate there was also an astrological dimension to his thought, usually glossed over by Church commentators. The Age of Aries was the Age of the Father, Pisces the Age of the Son, and Aquarius the Age of the Holy Spirit.
Joachim prophesied that there would be a time of transition from the second to the third age, when a new order of spiritual men would educate humanity, when Elijah would reappear, as prophesied in the last verse of the Old Testament in the Book of Malachi. Elijah would be the forerunner of the Messiah, arriving to usher in the great
RAMON LULL, DOCTOR ILLUMINATUS, was a missionary to the Muslims whose thought was nevertheless saturated with Islamic ideas.
Ramon Lull was born in Palma, the capital of Majorca, in 1235 and brought up as a page in the royal court. He led a carefree life of pleasure. One day, lusting after a Genoese lady and wanting her badly, he rode his horse into the church of Eulalia where she was praying. She turned him away, but one day she responded to verses he had sent her by summoning him to a tryst. When he arrived, without warning she exposed her breast to him — it was being eaten away by a malignant disease.
This shock marked the beginning of the process of Lull’s conversion. It helped form his view of the world as a place of oscillating extremes, where appearance might well mask their opposites. In his most famous book,
Lull wrote of mounting the ladder of humanity to glory in the Divine Nature. This mystical ascent is achieved by working on what he calls the powers of the soul — feeling, imagination, understanding and will. In this way he was helping to forge the deeply personal form of alchemy that, as we will see, would be the great engine of esoteric Europe.
In one of his harsher sayings he said: ‘If thou speaketh truth, O fool, thou wilt be beaten by men tormented, reproved and killed’. While preaching to the Muslims in North Africa he was set upon by a crowd, led out of the city and stoned to death.
FRANCIS WAS BORN INTO A WORLD WHERE serfs suffered extreme poverty and where the deformed, the aged, the destitute and lepers were treated with utter contempt. The wealthy clergy made a good living out of the serfs and persecuted anyone who disagreed with them.
In 1206 Francis was a rich young man in his twenties in Assisi in Italy. He was leading a carefree and heartless life, avoiding all contact with hardship, holding his nose if he saw a leper.
It is impossible not to see the parallels with the life of Prince Siddartha.
Then one day he was out riding when his horse suddenly reared up and he found himself looking down at a leper. He dismounted and before he knew it was grasping the leper’s bloody hand, and kissing the supurating cheeks and lips. He felt the leper withdraw his hand, and when Francis looked up he saw the leper had
