“And the Great Name of God, as expressed in the Tetragrammaton,” Diotallevi said, “has seventy-two letters—and seven plus two makes nine. But that’s not all, if you’ll allow me. The Pythagorean tradition, which cabala preserves—or perhaps inspired—notes that the sum of the odd numbers from one to seven is sixteen, and the sum of the even numbers from two to eight is twenty, and twenty plus sixteen makes thirty-six.”
“My God, Professor!” The colonel was beside himself. “I knew it, I knew it! You’ve given me the courage to go on. Now I know that I’m close to the truth.”
Had Diotallevi turned arithmetic into a religion, or religion into arithmetic? Perhaps both. Or maybe he was just an atheist flirting with the rapture of some superior heaven. He could have become a fanatic of roulette (and that would have been better); instead, he thought of himself as an unbelieving rabbi.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but Belbo intervened and broke the spell with his Piedmont-style good sense. More lines of the message remained for the colonel to interpret, and we were all eager to hear. It was now six o’clock. Six P.M., I thought: eighteen hours.
“All right,” Belbo said. “Thirty-six per century; step by step the knights prepare to converge on the Stone. But what is this Stone?”
“Really, gentlemen! The Stone is, of course, the Grail.”
The Middle Ages awaited the hero of the Graal and expected that the head of the Holy Roman Empire would become an image and a manifestation of that “King of the World.”…The invisible Emperor was to become also the visible one, and the Middle Ages would be “middle” in the sense of “central”…the invisible, inviolable center, the sovereign who must reawaken, the same hero, avenging and restoring. These are not fantasies of a dead, romantic past, but, rather, the simple truth for those who, today, alone can legitimately call themselves alive.
—Julius Evola, Il mistero del Graal, Rome, Edizioni Mediterranee, 1983, chapter 23 and epilogue
“You mean the Grail also comes into this?” Belbo asked.
“Naturally. And I’m not the only one who says so. You are educated men; there is no need for me to go into the legend of the Grail. The Knights of the Round Table, the mystical quest for this miraculous object, which some believe was the chalice in which the blood of Jesus was collected. The Grail taken to France by Joseph of Arimathea. Others say it is a stone that possesses mysterious powers.
The Grail is often depicted as a dazzling light. It’s a symbol representing power, a source of immense energy. It nourishes, heals wounds, blinds, strikes down…. Some have thought of it as the philosopher’s stone of the alchemists, but even if that’s so, what was the philosopher’s stone if not a symbol of some cosmic energy?
The literature on the subject is endless, but you can easily distinguish signs that are irrefutable. In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival the Grail is said to be kept in a Templar castle! Was Eschenbach an initiate? A foolhardy writer who revealed too much? But there is more.
This Grail kept by the Templars is described as a stone fallen from the heavens: lapis exillis. It’s not clear whether the expression means ‘stone from heaven’ (ex coelis) or ‘stone from exile.’ But in either case, it is something that comes from far away, and some suggest that it could have been a meteorite. As far as we’re concerned, however, it is definitely a stone. Whatever the Grail may have been, for the Templars it was the symbol of the objective, or end of the plan.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “but the document indicates that the knights’ sixth meeting would be held near or above a stone. It doesn’t tell them to find the stone.”
“Another subtle ambiguity, another luminous mystical analogy! Yes, indeed: the sixth meeting is to be held near a stone, and we shall soon see where; but at that stone, where the transmission of the plan is fulfilled and the six seals opened, the knights will learn where to find the Stone! It’s like the pun in the New Testament: Thou art Peter and upon this rock … On the stone you shall find the Stone.”
“It’s all quite obvious,” Belbo said. “Please go on. Casaubon, stop interrupting. We’re all eager to hear the rest.”
“Well then,” the colonel said, “the reference to the Grail made me think for a long time that the treasure was a huge deposit of radioactive material, perhaps of extraterrestrial origin. Consider, for example, the mysterious wound in the legend of King Amfortas. The account makes him sound like a radiologist who has been dangerously exposed. He is not to be touched.
Why not? Imagine how excited the Templars must have been when they reached the shores of the Dead Sea, whose waters, as you gentlemen surely know, are so dense that on them you float like a cork. It is a sea with curative powers. They could have discovered a deposit of radium or uranium in Palestine, a deposit they weren’t in a position to exploit then and there.
“The relationship between the Grail, the Templars, and the Cathars was investigated scientifically by a valiant German officer. I’m referring to Otto Rahn, an SS Obersturmbannführer who devoted his life to rigorous, scholarly study of the European and Aryan nature of the Grail.
I won’t go into why and how he lost his life in 1939, but some insist that … Well, how can I forget what happened to Ingolf? In any case, Rahn demonstrated a link between the Golden Fleece of the Argonauts and the Grail. It’s obvious that there’s a connection between the Grail, the philosopher’s stone, and the enormous power source that Hitler’s followers were seeking on the eve of the war and pursued to their last breath.
In one version of the Argonauts’ story, remember, they see a cup—a cup, mind you—floating over the Mountain of the World with the Tree of Light. When the Argonauts find the Golden Fleece, their ship is magically borne into the Milky Way, in the austral sky, where the luminous nature of God eternal is made manifest by the Southern Cross, the Triangle, and the Altar. The triangle symbolizes the Holy Trinity, the cross the divine Sacrifice of love, and the altar is the Table of the Supper, on which stood the Cup of the Resurrection. The Celtic and Aryan origin of all these symbols is obvious.”
The colonel seemed caught in the same heroic ecstasy that had impelled his Obersturmunddrang, or whatever the hell that German was, to the supreme sacrifice. Someone had to bring him down to earth.
“Where is all this leading?” I asked.
“Signor Casaubon, can’t you see it for yourself? The Grail has been called the Luciferian Stone, which points to the figure of Baphomet. The Grail is a power source, the Templars were the guardians of an energy secret, and they drew up their plan accordingly. Where would the unknown commanderies be established? Where, gentlemen?” And the colonel looked at us with a conspiratorial air, as if we were all in the plot together. “I had a trail to follow, erroneous but useful.
In 1797, Charles Louis Cadet de Gassicourt, an author who must have overheard some secrets, wrote a book entitled Le tombeau de Jacques Molay ou le secret des conspirateurs à ceux qui veulent tout savoir.
By an interesting coincidence, his work turned up in Ingolf’s little library. He claims that Molay, before his death, set up four secret lodges: in Paris, Scotland, Stockholm, and Naples. These four lodges were to exterminate all monarchs and destroy the power of the pope. Gassicourt was an eccentric, of course, but I used his idea as a starting point from which to determine where the Templars might have located their secret centers. I wouldn’t have been able to understand the enigmas of the message if I hadn’t had some guiding idea. But I did have such an idea. It was my conviction, based on abundant evidence, that the Templar spirit was of Celtic, druidic origin; it was the spirit of Nordic Arianism, traditionally associated with the island of Avalon, seat of the legendary civilization of the far north.
As you surely know, various authors have identified Avalon as the Garden of the Hesperides or as Ultima Thule, or as the Colchis of the Golden Fleece. It’s hardly an accident that history’s greatest chivalric order was la Toison d’Or, the Order of the Golden Fleece. Which makes it clear what the word ‘castle’ in the message really means: it refers to the hyperboreal, the northernmost castle, where the Templars kept the Grail, probably the mythical Monsalvat.”
He paused, wanting us to hang on his every word. We hung.
“Now let’s go back to the second command in the message: The guardians of the seal are to go to a place associated with bread. This instruction is completely clear: the Grail is the chalice that contained Christ’s blood, the bread is Christ’s body, the place where the bread was eaten is the place of the Last Supper, Jerusalem. It seems impossible that the Templars wouldn’t have maintained a secret base there, even after the Saracen reconquest. I must admit that at first I was troubled by this Jewish element in a plan so deeply imbued with Aryan mythology.
But then I realized: We are the ones who continue to regard Jesus as deriving from the Judaic religion, because that’s what the Church of Rome has always taught us. But the Templars knew that Jesus was
