“The six groups settle in six places, but only one place is called the Refuge. Odd. This must mean that in the other places, like Portugal and Britain, the Templars can live undisturbed, although under another name, whereas in the Refuge they are completely hidden. I would say it is where the Templars of Paris went after they left the Temple. To me it seems economical for the route to go to England from France, but why not assume that the Templars took an even more economical course and set up a refuge in a secret and protected place in Paris itself? Being sound politicians, they reasoned that in two hundred years the situation would change and they would be able to act in the light of day, or almost.”
“Paris it is. And the fourth place?”
“The colonel was thinking of Chartres, but if we make Paris the third place, we can’t put down Chartres as the fourth, because obviously the Plan has to involve all the centers of Europe. Besides, we’re leaving the mystical trail to work out a political trail. The pattern appears to be a sine wave, so we should go to the north of Germany. ‘Beyond the water,’ that is, beyond the Rhine, there’s a city—not a church—of Our Lady. Near Danzig, there’s a city of the Virgin—in other words, Marienburg.”
“Why meet at Marienburg?”
“Because it was the seat of the Teutonic Knights! Relations between the Templars and the Teutonics hadn’t been poisoned like those between the Templars and the Hospitalers, who had waited like vultures for the suppression of the Temple in order to seize its wealth. The Teutonics were created in Palestine by German emperors as a counterbalance to the Templars, but they were soon called north to stem the invasion of Prussian barbarians.
They succeeded so well that in the space of two centuries they became a state that spread out over all the Baltic lands. They moved between Poland, Lithuania, and Livonia. They founded Königsberg. They were defeated only once, by Aleksandr Nevski in Estonia. About the time the Templars were arrested in Paris, the Teutonics established the capital of their realm at Marienburg. If there was any spiritual-knighthood plan of world conquest, the Templars and the Teutonics had divided the spheres of influence between them.”
“You know what?” Belbo said. “I’m with you. Now the fifth group. Where are these Popelicans?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You disappoint me, Casaubon. Maybe we should ask Abulafia.”
“No. Abulafia can only connect facts, not create them. The Popelicans are a fact, not a connection, and facts are the province of Sam Spade. Give me a few days.”
“I’ll give you two weeks,” Belbo said. “If, within two weeks, you don’t hand the Popelicans over to me, you’ll buy me a bottle of twelve-year-old Ballantine’s.”
Beyond my means. A week later I delivered the Popelicans to my greedy partners.
“It’s all clear. Now follow me, because we must go back to the fourth century, to Byzantium, when various movements of Manichean inspiration have already spread throughout the Mediterranean. We begin with the Archontics, founded in Armenia by Peter of Capharbarucha—and you have to admit that’s a pretty grand name. Anti-Semitic, the Archontics identify the Devil with Sabaoth, the god of the Jews, who lives in the seventh heaven. To reach the Great Mother of Light in the eighth heaven, it is necessary to reject both Sabaoth and baptism. All right?”
“Consider them rejected,” Belbo said.
“But the Archontics are still nice kids at heart. In the fifth century the Massalians come along, and actually they survive until the eleventh century, in Thrace. The Massalians are not dualists but monarchians, and they have dealings with the infernal powers, and in fact some texts call them Borborites, from borboros, filth, because of the unspeakable things they do.”
“What do they do?”
“The usual unspeakable things. Men and women hold in the palm of their hand, and raise to heaven, their own ignominy, namely, sperm or menstruum, then eat it, calling it the Body of Christ. And if by chance a woman is made pregnant, at the opportune moment they stick a hand into her womb, pull out the embryo, throw it into a mortar, mix in some honey and pepper, and gobble it up.”
“How revolting, honey and pepper!” Diotallevi said.
“So those are the Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latter-day Gnostics, therefore dualists, who worshiped the Great Mother Barbelo, and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics, or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect, the Rotary Club of the whole business. But maybe the Stratiotics were only the Hylics of the Mithraists.”
“Sounds a bit confused,” Belbo said.
“Naturally. None of these people left records. The only things we know about them come to us from the gossip of their enemies. But no matter. Pm just trying to show you what a mess the Middle East was at the time. And to set the stage for the Paulicians. These are the followers of a certain Paul, joined by some iconoclasts expelled from Albania. From the eighth century on, the Paulicians grow rapidly, the sect becomes a community, the community a force, a political power, and the emperors of Byzantium, beginning to get worried, send the imperial armies against them.
The Paulicians extend as far as the confines of the Arab world; they spread toward the Euphrates, and northward as far as the Black Sea. They establish colonies more or less everywhere, and we find them as late as the seventeenth century, when they are converted by the Jesuits, and some communities still exist today in the Balkans or thereabouts. Now, what do the Paulicians believe in? In God, One and Three, except that the Demiurge defiantly created the world, with the unfortunate results visible to all.
The Paulicians reject the Old Testament, refuse the sacraments, despise the Cross, and don’t honor the Virgin, because Christ was incarnated directly in heaven and passed through Mary as through a pipe. The Bogomils, who are partly derived from them, say that Christ went in one ear of Mary and came out the other, without her even noticing. The Paulicians are also accused of worshiping the sun and the Devil and of mixing children’s blood in their bread and the Eucharistic wine.”
“Like everybody else.”
“Those were the days when, for a heretic, going to Mass was a torment. Might as well become Moslem. Anyway, that’s the sort of people they were. And I’m telling you about them because, when the dualist heretics spread through Italy and Provence, they are called—to indicate that they’re like the Paulicians—Popelicans, Publicans, Populicans, who gallice etiam dicuntur ab aliquis popelicant!”
“So there they are.”
“Yes, finally. The Paulicians continue into the ninth century, driving the Byzantine emperors crazy until Emperor Basil vows that if he gets his hands on their leader, Chrysocheir, who invaded the church of Saint John of God at Ephesus and watered his horse at the holy-water fonts…”
“A familiar nasty habit,” Belbo said.
“…he’ll shoot three arrows into his head. He sends the imperial army after Chrysocheir; they capture him, cut off his head, send it to the emperor, who places it on a table—or a trumeau, on a little porphyry column—and shoots three arrows, wham wham wham, into it, probably an arrow for each eye and the third for the mouth.”
“Nice folks,” Diotallevi said.
“They didn’t do it to be mean,” Belbo said. “It was a question of faith. Go on, Casaubon: our Diotallevi doesn’t understand theological fine points.”
“To conclude: the Crusaders encounter the Paulicians. They come upon them near Antioch in the course of the First Crusade, where the heretics are fighting alongside the Arabs, and they encounter them also at the siege of Constantinople, where the Paulician community of Philip-popolis tries to hand the city over to the Bulgarian tsar Yoannitsa to spite the French, as Villehardouin tells us.
Here’s the connection with the Templars and the solution to our riddle. Legend has the Templars inspired by the Cathars, but it’s really the other way around. The Templars, encountering the Paulician communities in the course of the Crusades, established mysterious relations with them, as they had before with the mystics and the Moslem heretics. Just follow the track of the Ordonation. It has to pass through the Balkans.”
“Why?”
“Because, clearly, the sixth appointment is in Jerusalem. The message says to go to the stone. And where is there a stone, a rock, which the Moslems venerate, and for which, if we want to see it, we have to take off our shoes? Why, right in the center of the Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem, where once stood the Temple of the Templars. I don’t know who was to wait in Jerusalem, perhaps a core group of surviving and disguised Templars, or else some cabalists connected with the Portuguese, but this much is certain: to reach Jerusalem from Germany the most logical route is through the Balkans, and there the fifth group, the Paulician one, was waiting. You see how straightforward and economical the Plan becomes?”
“I must say I’m persuaded,” Belbo said. “But where in the Balkans were the Popelicans waiting?”
“If you ask me, the natural successors of the Paulicians were the Bulgarian Bogomils, but the Templars of Provins couldn’t have known that a few years later Bulgaria would be invaded by the Turks and
