I was moved as I entered the church of the Templars, which had an octagonal rotunda reproducing that of the Holy Sepulcher, and I was surprised to see that the Templars’ crosses had different forms, depending on their location. It was a problem I had encountered before, when I went through the confused iconography on the subject. Whereas the cross of the Knights of Malta had remained more or less the same, the Templar cross had been influenced by periods and local traditions. That’s why Templar-hunters, finding any kind of cross in a place, immediately think they’ve discovered a trace of the knights.
Our guide took us to see the Manueline window, the janela par excellence, a filigree, a collage of marine and submarine troves, seaweeds, shells, anchors, capstans, and chains, celebrating the knights’ achievements on the oceans. The window was framed by two towers, which were decorated with carvings of the insigne of the Garter. What was the symbol of an English order doing in a Portuguese fortified monastery? The guide couldn’t say; but a little later, on another side, the northeast, I believe, he showed us the insigne of the Golden Fleece.
I couldn’t help thinking of the subtle game of alliances that had united the Garter to the Golden Fleece, the Fleece to the Argonauts, the Argonauts to the Grail, and the Grail to the Templars. Remembering Colonel Ardenti’s narrative and a few pages from the Diabolicals’ manuscripts, I started when our guide showed us into a side room whose ceiling was gripped by keystones. They were rosettes, but on some of them was carved a bearded caprine face: Baphomet….
We went down into a crypt. After seven steps, a bare stone floor led to the apse, where an altar could stand, or the chair of the grand master. You reached it by passing beneath seven keystones, each in the form of a rose, one larger than the next, with the last set over a well. The Cross and the Rose, in a Templar monastery, and in a room surely built before the Rosicrucian manifestoes…. I put some questions to the guide. He smiled. “If you knew how many students of the occult sciences come here on pilgrimages … It’s said that this was the initiation chamber.”
Entering by chance a room not yet restored, which contained a few pieces of dusty furniture, I found the floor cluttered with great cardboard boxes. Rummaging at random, I uncovered some fragments of volumes in Hebrew, presumably from the seventeenth century. What were the Jews doing in Tomar? The guide told me that the knights had maintained friendly relations with the local Jewish community. He had me look out the window and showed me a little garden designed like an elegant French maze—the work, he told me, of an eighteenth-century Jewish architect: Samuel Schwarz.
The second appointment in Jerusalem … And the first at the Castle? Wasn’t that how the message of Provins went? By God, the Castle of the Ordonation mentioned in Ingolf’s document was not the Monsalvat of chivalric novels, the Avalon of the Hyperboreal. No. What castle would the Templars of Provins, more used to directing commanderies than to reading romances of the Round Table, have chosen for their first meeting place? Why, Tomar, the castle of the Knights of Christ, a place where survivors of the order enjoyed complete freedom, unchanged guarantees, and where they could be in contact with the agents of the second group!
I left Tomar and Portugal with my mind ablaze. No longer was I laughing at the message Ardenti had shown us. The Templars, when they became a secret order, worked out a Plan that was to last six hundred years and conclude in our century. The Templars were serious men. If they talked about a castle, they meant a real castle. The Plan began at Tomar. And what would the ideal route have been, the sequence of the other five meetings? Places where the Templars could count on friendship, protection, complicity. The colonel spoke of Stonehenge, Avalon, Agarttha….Nonsense. The message had to be completely restudied.
Of course—I reminded myself on my way home—the idea is not to discover the Templars’ secret, but to construct it.
Belbo seemed disturbed at the thought of going back to the document left by the colonel, and he found it only after digging reluctantly in a lower drawer. But, I saw, he had kept it. Together we reread the Provins message, after so many years.
It began with the message coded by the method of Trithemius: Les XXXVI inuisibles separez en six bandes. And then:
a la … Saint Jean
36 p charrete de fein
6 … entiers avec saiel
p … les blancs mantiax
r… s… chevaliers de Pruins pour la … j.nc.
6 foiz 6 en 6 places
chascune foiz 20 a … 120 a…
iceste est l’ordonation
al donjon li premiers
it li secunzjoste iceus qui … pans
it al refuge
it a Nostre Dame de l’altre part de l’iau
it a I’ostel des popelicans
it a la pierre
3 foiz 6 avant la feste … La Grant Pute.
“Thirty-six years after the hay wain, the night of Saint John of the year 1344, six sealed messages for the knights with the white cloaks, the relapsed knights of Provins, revenge. Six times six in six places, twenty years each time, for a total of one hundred and twenty years, this is the Plan. The first at the Castle, then with those who ate the bread, then at the Refuge, then at Our Lady Beyond the River, then at the House of the Popelicans, then at the Stone. You see, in 1344 the message says that the first must go to the Castle. And, in fact, the knights were established in Tomar in 1357. Now, we must ask ourselves where the second group went. Come on: imagine you are an escaping Templar, where would you go to form the second group?”
“H’m … If it’s true that those in the wain fled to Scotland … But why should they have gone to Scotland in particular to eat the bread?”
I was becoming a master of chains of association. You could start anywhere. Scotland. Highlands. Druidic rites. Night of Saint John. Summer solstice. Saint John’s Fire. Golden bough. Because I had read about Saint John’s Fire in Frazer’s Golden Bough.
I telephoned Lia. “Do me a favor. Get The Golden Bough and see what it says about Saint John’s Fire.”
Lia was terrific at this sort of thing. She found the chapter at once. “What do you want to know? It’s a very ancient rite, practiced in almost all European countries. It’s celebrated at the moment when the sun is at its peak. Saint John was added to make the thing Christian….”
“Do they eat bread in Scotland?”
“Let me see…. I don’t think so…. Ah, here it is: they don’t eat bread for Saint John, but on the night of the first of May, the night of the Beltane fires, originally a Druid festival, they eat bread, especially in the Scottish highlands….”
“We’ve got it! What kind?”
“They knead a cake of flour and oats and toast it on embers…. Then a rite follows that recalls ancient human sacrifices…. The bread’s called bannock cakes….”
“What? Spell it!” She did, and I thanked her, I told her she was my Beatrice, my Morgan le Fay, and other endearments.
I tried to remember my thesis. The secret group, according to the legend, took refuge in Scotland with King Robert the Bruce, and the Templars helped the king win the battle of Bannockburn. In reward, the king set them up as the new Order of the Knights of Saint Andrew of Scotland.
I took a big English dictionary down from the shelf and looked up bannock: bannok in Middle English, bannuc in Anglo-Saxon, bannach in Gaelic. A kind of cake, cooked on a grill or a slab, made of barley, oats, or other grain. Burn is a stream. You had only to translate Bannockburn as the French Templars would have done when they sent news from Scotland to their compatriots in Provins, and you get something like the stream of the cake, or of the loaf, or of the bread.
Those who ate the bread were those who had won at the stream of the bread, and hence the Scottish group, which perhaps by that time had spread throughout the British Isles. Logical: from Portugal to England. That was a shorter route, much shorter than Ardenti’s from Pole to Palestine.
Let your garments be white….If it is dark, set many lights burning…. Now begin combining letters, few, many, shift them and combine them until your heart is warm. Pay attention to the movement of the letters and to what you can produce by combining them. And when your heart is warm, when you see that through the combination of the letters you grasp things you could not have known by yourself or with the aid of tradition, when you are ready to receive the influence of the divine power that enters into you, then use all the profundity of your thought to imagine in your heart the Name and His higher angels, as if they were human beings beside you.
—Abulafia, Sefer Haie Olam
“It makes sense,” Belbo said. “And in that case,
