Ariadne, who intercedes to help save Theseus, is, in the Chartrean context, Mary who gave birth to the Sun king and through whose intercession we may give birth to our own higher selves.
The labyrinth at Chartres can therefore be seen as a sort of mandala or aid to meditation and to achieving an altered state. In the sacred geometry of the cathedral the labyrinth is mirrored by another mandala, the great rose window.
The stained glass of the Middle Ages appeared first in Iran/Iraq in the eleventh century. The extraordinary, luminescent glass of Chartres was manufactured by medieval alchemical adepts who had learned the secrets of the Arabs and whose techniques we cannot now reproduce. Schwaller de Lubicz, the great Egyptologist, explained to his biographer André Vanden Broeck that the brilliant reds and blues of the stained glass at Chartres used no chemical pigmentation but a separation of the volatile spirit of metals that he tested with the famous alchemist Fulcanelli and also found in shards of glass he unearthed in Egypt.
The rose window, which in its outer circle displays the signs of the zodiac, represents the chakra ablaze as it should be when we reach the centre of life’s labyrinth, dancing finally to the Music of the Spheres. Not for nothing has Chartres Cathedral been described as an alchemical crucible for the transformation of humanity.
Islam was weaving its way into the fabric of the whole world both esoterically and exoterically. Then, in 1076, Turkish Muslims took control of Jerusalem.
18. THE WISE DEMON OF THE TEMPLARS
The Prophecies of Joachim • The Loves of Ramón Lull • St Francis and the Buddha • Roger Bacon Mocks Thomas Aquinas • The Templars Worship Baphomet
IN 1076 TURKISH MUSLIMS TOOK control of Jerusalem and began to persecute Christian pilgrims. The Crusaders freed Jerusalem, then lost it again.
In 1119 five knights met under the leadership of Hugo de Payens at the place of the Crucifixion. Like the knights who had ridden in the quest for the Grail, they vowed to make themselves worthy vessels to carry the blood of Christ. In order to protect pilgrims, they set up their headquarters in what was believed to have been the site of 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 esprit de corps and tight organizational structure made them extraordinarily successful in influencing, if not directing, world affairs.
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 inovatio. Joachim also prophesied the Anti-Christ will incarnate before the third age began. As we shall see, Joachim’s prophecies still fascinate the secret societies today.