Holy Blood, Holy Grail (17 page)

According to Masonic teachings, Ormus was the name of an Egyptian sage and mystic, a Gnostic ‘adept’ of Alexandria. He lived, supposedly, during the early years of the Christian epoch. In A.D. 46 he and six of his followers were supposedly converted to a form of Christianity by one of Jesus’s disciples, Saint Mark in most accounts. From this conversion a new sect or order is said to have been born, which fused the tenets of early

Christianity with the teachings of other, even older mystery schools. To our knowledge this story cannot be authenticated. At the same time, however, it is certainly plausible.

During the first century A.D.

Alexandria was a veritable hotbed of mystical activity, a crucible in which Judaic, Mithraic,

Zoroastrian, Pythagorean, Hermetic and Neo-Platonic doctrines suffused the air and combined with innumerable others. Teachers of every conceivable kind abounded; and it would hardly be surprising if one of them adopted a name implying the principle of light.

According to Masonic tradition, in A.D. 46 Ormus is said to have conferred on his newly constituted ‘order of initiates’ a specific identifying symbol - a red or a rose cross. Granted, the red cross was subsequently to find an echo in the blazon of the Knights Templar, but the import of the text in the Dossiers secrets, and in other “Prieure documents’, is unequivocally clear. One is intended to see in Ormus the origins of the so-called

Rose-Croix, or Rosicrucians. And in 1188 the Prieure de Sion is said to have adopted a second subtitle, in addition to “Ormus’. It is said to have called itself 1”Ordre de la Rose-Croix Veritas.

At this point we seemed to be in very questionable territory, and the text in the “Prieure documents’ began to appear highly suspect. We were familiar with the claims of the modern “Rosicrucians’ in California and other contemporary organisations, who claim for themselves, after the fact, a pedigree harking back to the mists of antiquity which includes most of the world’s great men.

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An “Order of the Rose-Croix’ dating from 1188 appeared equally spurious.

As Frances Yates had demonstrated convincingly, there is no known evidence of any “Rosicrucians’ (at least by that name) before the early seventeenth century or perhaps the last years of the sixteenth. ‘z The myth surrounding the legendary order dates from approximately 1605, and first gained impetus a decade later with the publication of three inflammatory tracts. These tracts, which appeared in 1614, 1615 and 1616 respectively, proclaimed the existence of a secret brotherhood or confraternity of mystical ‘initiates’, allegedly founded by one Christian Rosenkreuz who, it was maintained, was born in 1378 and died, at the hoary age of 106, in 1484. Christian Rosenkreuz and his secret confraternity are now generally acknowledged to have been fictitious a hoax of sorts, devised for some purpose no one has yet satisfactorily explained, although it was not without political repercussions at the time. Moreover, the author of one of the three tracts, the famous Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, which appeared in 1616, is now known. He was Johann Valentin Andrea, a

German writer and theologian living in Wurttemberg, who confessed that he composed The Chemical Wedding as a ‘ludibrium’ - a ‘joke’, or perhaps a ‘comedy’ in Dante’s and Balzac’s sense of the word. There is reason to believe that Andrea, or one of his associates, composed the other “Roiscrucian’ tracts as well; and it is to this source that

“Roiscrucianism’, as it evolved and as one thinks of it today, can be traced.

If the “Prieure documents’ were accurate, however, we would have to reconsider, and think in terms of something other than a seventeenth-century hoax. We would have to think in terms of a secret order or society that actually existed, a genuine clandestine brotherhood or confraternity. It need not have been wholly or even primarily mystical. It might well have been largely political. But it would have existed a full 425 years before its name ever became public, and a good two centuries before its legendary founder is alleged to have lived.

Again we found no substantiating evidence. Certainly the rose has been a mystical symbol from time immemorial, and enjoyed a particular vogue

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during the Middle Ages in the popular Romance of the Rose by jean de Meung, for instance, and in Dante’s Paradiso. And the red cross was also a traditional symbolic motif. Not only was it the blazon of the Knights

Templar. It subsequently became the Cross of Saint George and, as such, was adopted by the Order of the Garter created some thirty years after the fall of the Temple. But though roses and red crosses abounded as symbolic motifs, there was no evidence of an institution or an order, still less of a secret society.

On the other hand, Frances Yates maintains that there were secret societies functioning long before the seventeenth-century “Rosicrucians’ and that these earlier societies were, in fact, “Rosicrucian’ in political and philosophical orientation, if not necessarily in name.13

Thus, in conversation with one of our researchers, she described Leonardo as a

“Rosicrucian’ using the term as a metaphor to define his values and attitudes.

Not only that. In 1629, when “Rosicrucian’ interest in Europe was at its zenith, a man named Robert Denyau, cure of Gisors, composed an exhaustive history of Gisors and the Gisors family. In this manuscript Denyau states explicitly that the Rose-Croix was founded by jean de Gisors in 1188. In other words there is a verbatim seventeenth-century confirmation of the claims made by the “Prieure documents’. Granted, Denyau’s manuscript was composed some four and a half centuries after the alleged fact. But it constitutes an extremely important fragment of evidence. And the fact that it issues from Gisors renders it all the more important. ‘4

We were left, however, with no confirmation, only a possibility. But in every respect so far the “Prieure documents’ had proved astonishingly accurate. Thus it would have been rash to dismiss them out of hand. We were not prepared to accept them on blind, unquestioning faith. But we did feel obliged to reserve judgment.

The Prieure at Orleans

In addition to their more grandiose claims, the “Prieure documents’

offered information of a very different kind, minutiae so apparently trivial and inconsequential that their significance eluded us. At the

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same time the sheer un importance of this information argued in favour of its veracity. Quite simply there seemed to be no point in inventing or concocting such minor details. And what was more, the authenticity of many of these details could be confirmed.

Thus, for example, Girard, abbot of the ‘little priory’ at Orleans between 1239 and 1244. is said to have ceded a tract of land at Acre to the

Teutonic Knights. Why this should warrant mention is unclear, but it can be definitively established. The actual charter exists, dating from 1239 and bearing Girard’s signature.

Information of a similar, albeit more suggestive, kind is offered on an abbot named Adam, who presided over the “little priory’ at Orleans in 1281.

In that year, according to the “Prieure documents’, Adam ceded a tract of land near Orval to the monks then occupying the abbey there

-Cistercians, who had moved in under the aegis of Saint Bernard a century and a half before. We could not find written evidence of this particular transaction, but it would seem plausible enough there are charters attesting to numerous other transactions of the same nature.

What makes this one interesting, of course, is the recurrence of Orval, which had figured earlier in our inquiry. Moreover, the tract of land in question would seem to have been of special import, for the “Prieure documents’ tell us that

Adam incurred the wrath of the brethren of Sion for his donation so much so that he was apparently compelled to renounce his position. The act of abdication, according to the Dossiers secrets, was formally witnessed by

Thomas de Sainville, Grand Master of the Order of Saint Lazarus.

Immediately afterwards Adam is said to have gone to Acre, then to have fled the city when it fell to the Saracens and to have died in Sicily in 1291.

Again we could not find the actual charter of abdication. But Thomas de

Sainville was Grand Master of the Order of Saint Lazarus in 1281, and the headquarters of Saint Lazarus were near Orleans where Adam’s abdication would have taken place.

And there is no question that Adam went to Acre.

Two proclamations and two letters were in fact signed by him there, the

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first dated August 1281,”5 the second March 1289.”6 The “Head’ of the Templars

According to the “Prieure documents’, the Prieure de Sion was not, strictly speaking, a perpetuation or continuation of the Order of the Temple: on the contrary, the text stresses emphatically that the separation between the two orders dates from the ‘cutting of the elm’

in 1188. Apparently, however, some kind of rapport continued to exist, and, “in 1307, Guillaume de Gisors received the golden head, Caput LVIII Fa from the Order of the Temple.””

Our investigation of the Templars had already acquainted us with this mysterious head.

To link it with Sion, however, and with the seemingly important Gisors family, again struck us as dubious as if the “Prieure documents’ were straining to make powerful and evocative connections.

And yet it was precisely on this point that we found some of our most solid and intriguing confirmation. According to the official records of the

Inquisition:

The guardian and administrator of the goods of the Temple at Paris, after the arrests, was a man of the King named Guillaume Pidoye.

Before the

Inquisitors on May 11th, 1308, he declared that at the time of the arrest of the Knights Templar, he, together with his colleague Guillaume de Gisors and one Raynier Bourdon, had been ordered to present to the Inquisition all the figures of metal or wood they had found. Among the goods of the Temple they had found a large head of silver gilt .. . the image of a woman, which

Guillaume, on May 11th, presented before the Inquisition. The head carried a label, “CAPUT LVIIIm’.”8

If the head continued to baffle us, the context in which Guillaume de Gisors appeared was equally perplexing. He is specifically cited as being a colleague of Guillaume Pidoye, one of King Philippe’s men. In other words he, like Philippe, would seem to have been hostile to the Templars and participated in the attack upon them. According to the

“Prieure documents’, however, Guillaume was Grand Master of the Prieure de Sion at the time. Did this mean that Sion endorsed Philippe’s action against the Temple, perhaps even collaborated in it? There are

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certain “Prieure documents’ which hint that this may have been the case that Sion, in some unspecified way, authorised and presided over the dissolution of its unruly proteges. On the other hand, the

“Prieure documents’ also imply that

Sion exercised a kind of paternal protectiveness towards at least certain

Templars during the Order’s last days. If this is true, Guillaume de Gisors might well have been a ‘double-agent’. He might well have been responsible for the ‘leak’ of Philippe’s plans, the means whereby the Templars received advance warning of the king’s machinations against them. If, after the formal separation in 1188, Sion did in fact continue to exercise some clandestine control over Temple affairs, Guillaume de Gisors might have been partially responsible for the careful destruction of the Order’s documents and the unexplained disappearance of its treasure.

The Grand Masters of the Templars

In addition to the fragmentary information discussed above, the text in the

Dossiers secrets includes three lists of names. The first of these is straightforward enough -the least interesting, and the least open to controversy or doubt, being merely a list of abbots who presided over Sion’s lands in Palestine between 1152 and 1281. Our research confirmed its veracity: it appears elsewhere, independent of the Dossiers secrets, and in accessible, unimpugnable sources.”9 The lists in these sources agree with that in the Dossiers secrets, except that two names are missing in the sources. In this case, then, the “Prieure documents’ not only agree with verifiable history, but are more comprehensive in that they fill certain lacunae.

The second list in the Dossiers secrets is a list of the Grand Masters of the Knights Templar from 1118 until 1190 in other words, from the Temple’s public foundation until its separation from Sion and the ‘cutting of the elm’ at Gisors. At first there seemed nothing unusual or extraordinary about this list. When we compared it to other lists, however those cited by acknowledged historians writing on the Templars, for instance certain obvious discrepancies quickly emerged.

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According to virtually all other known lists, there were ten Grand Masters between 1118 and 1190. According to the Dossiers secrets, there were only eight. According to most other lists, Andre de Montbard Saint Bernard’s uncle was not only a co-founder of the Order, but also its

Grand Master between 1153 and 1156. According to the Dossiers secrets, however, Andre was never Grand Master, but would seem to have continued functioning as he does all through his career behind the scenes. According to most other lists, Bertrand de Blanchefort appears as sixth Grand Master of the Temple, assuming his office after Andre de Montbard, in 1156.

According to the Dossiers secrets, Bertrand is not sixth, but fourth in succession, becoming Grand Master in 1153. There were other such discrepancies and contradictions, and we were uncertain what to make of them or how seriously to take them. Because it disagreed with those compiled by established historians, were we to regard the list in the Dossiers secrets as wrong?

It must be emphasised that no official or definitive list of the Temple’s

Grand Masters exists. Nothing of the sort has been preserved or handed down to posterity. The Temple’s own records were destroyed or disappeared, and the earliest known compilation of the Order’s Grand Masters dates from 1342 thirty years after the Order itself was suppressed, and 225 years after its foundation. As a result historians compiling lists of Grand Masters have based their findings on contemporary chroniclers -