The Armageddon Conspiracy (13 page)

Vernon nodded.

‘
Well,’ Harrington
intervened, ‘both of you may be experts, but all I know about the
Cathars is that they came from Languedoc in the southwest of
France, and I only know that because I once went on a weekend trip
to Carcassonne to see the walled city, and it turned out to be the
capital of Cathar country.’

‘
OK, I’ll give you my
one-minute introduction to the Cathars,’ Vernon said.
‘They were
one of the strangest sects in history.
Their name comes from the
ancient Greek word katharoi meaning
the
pure
.
The Cathars, the pure ones, were
renowned for living good, simple lives.
They had few possessions,
were peace-loving, vegetarian, and frowned on sex.

‘
Lots of ordinary
Catholics looked at the ascetic lives of the Cathars and thought
they seemed much holier, much more Christ-like than most Catholics,
especially the priests and monks who were notoriously sleazy at
that time.
Before long, many Catholics started converting to
Catharism.

‘
The Catholic Church
wasn’t slow to see the danger.
Realising war was coming, perhaps a
war of extermination, and that their beliefs might be lost forever,
the Cathars desperately thought of how they might pass on their
religion to future generations.
They had to come up with something
that communicated their beliefs without attracting the suspicions
of the Catholic Church.
The legend of the Holy Grail was their
solution.
On one level, it seemed like an orthodox Catholic story,
but it was the opposite – pure heresy.
It’s a simple fact that
before the Grail romances appeared, there wasn’t a single mention
of anything called the Holy Grail, and no legend saying that Joseph
of Arimathea was its original keeper.
Even as far back as 1260, the
legend of the Holy Grail was known not to be an authentic Christian
story.

‘
Following Otto Rahn’s
line of thought, Lucy argued that the Grail legends described in
coded form the initiation ceremonies and religious rites of the
Cathars, but now transformed into chivalrous stories.
Everything
was symbolic, all of the characters in the stories carefully
chosen.
Many of the troubadours, the great romantic poets of the
Middle Ages, were Cathars and they brought all their art to bear on
the creation of the legends.
These were the greatest romances ever
devised, inspiring everyone who read them, and unwittingly feeding
them incredibly powerful heretical ideas.

‘
Meanwhile, relations
with the Catholic Church continued to deteriorate.
Pope Innocent
III decided on drastic action.
He ordered a Crusade against the
Cathars and on 24 June 1209, the feast day of John the Baptist –
one of the Cathars’ most sacred days – the Crusader army set out
from Lyon.

‘
Although the Cathars
didn’t approve of violence, they fought back, mostly using
mercenaries, and the war dragged on for decades.
In 1231, the next
Pope, Gregory IX, set up an institution for stamping out heresy
once and for all – the Inquisition.
In 1243, the Cathars made what
was effectively their last stand at their mountain stronghold of
Montségur.
The Catholic army besieged it for months before the
garrison finally surrendered in 1244.
Those in the garrison who
refused to recant their heresy were burnt at the stake en masse at
the foot of the mountain.’

‘
OK, I get the
picture,’ Harrington said.
‘An unorthodox religion gets wiped out
by a much bigger religion and tries to survive in some way by
hiding its beliefs in the form of a story that lives on after the
religion has died, providing hope that the religion can be reborn
some day.’

Vernon nodded again.

‘
So, what was Lucy’s
theory about these hidden meanings?
Why was her work controversial?
I mean, what did she say that Rahn didn’t?’

‘
According to the basic
legend, the Grail is in the keeping of a man called the Fisher King
who lives in the Grail Castle, surrounded by warrior monks.
He has
a mysterious wound on his upper thigh, or even in his genitals,
which never heals.
Lucy was curious about the use of the
title
Fisher King
.
The symbol of the fish was known from antiquity to represent divine
life.
Only one person can offer divine life, and so Lucy argued
that the Fisher King must be another name for God.
The worthy – the
Cathars – would be caught in his fishing nets while the unworthy –
the Catholics – would swim right through.
It saddened God that so
many fish in the sea couldn’t be saved.
They were his metaphorical
wound that never healed.
Only when all of humanity returned to him
would his wound vanish.

‘
The Fisher King’s
Grail Castle, hidden from the unworthy, was heaven; the Wasteland
outside, hell.
The Wasteland would disappear only when the Fisher
King was cured, and that would happen only when Catharism
triumphed.

‘
Lucy wanted to know
how those in the Wasteland could find the hidden Grail castle.
Only
those who rejected their old, false beliefs and started seeking the
truth – Catharism – would succeed, she claimed.
In the castle, they
would be shown a solemn ceremony where the Grail Hallows – a spear,
cup, sword and dish – would be presented to them.

‘
If they understood the
meaning of the ceremony – which would signify that they’d been
fully initiated into Catharism – the Grail seekers would know to
ask the Fisher King a particular question.
If they failed to ask
the right question, because they were still clinging to the false
doctrines of other religions, they’d leave the castle and never
find it again.

‘
Lucy thought the Grail
Hallows should be separated into two pairs: the spear and the cup,
the sword and the dish.
The first pair represented Christianity.
The spear was the Roman lance thrust into Christ’s side at the
Crucifixion, and Christ used the cup at the Last
Supper.’

‘
What about the sword
and dish?’
Harrington asked.

‘
That’s the radical
part of Lucy’s theory.
She said the sword was the one used to
behead John the Baptist.
His head was placed on a dish to be
presented to Salome as her reward for dancing for King Herod.
So,
the sword and dish stood for John the Baptist rather than Christ.
Grail seekers had to choose between the two pairs.
If you chose
correctly, you were a true believer; otherwise you were
damned.’

‘
I don’t understand,’
Gresnick said.
‘Are you saying Lucy thought there was some kind of
opposition between John the Baptist and Jesus?’

‘
Exactly, colonel.
People forget that John the Baptist was only six months older than
Jesus, and that they were related by blood.
Their mothers were
cousins.
Some people thought John was more important than Jesus.
Lucy believed the Cathars were descended from an early Gnostic sect
called the Johannites who considered John the Baptist the true
Messiah.
Jesus, so the story goes, was merely one of John’s
disciples.
Jesus openly said, ‘None is greater than John.
He
is
more
than a
prophet.’
In other words, Jesus himself acknowledged that John was
the real Messiah.
But things changed and Jesus decided to betray
John, and one of his fellow conspirators was Salome.
That’s why she
asked for John’s head.
There’s supposedly a gospel called
The Gospel According to Salome
, suppressed by the early Christian leaders, that relates the
whole sordid tale.

‘
In the book, Salome
claims that Caiaphas, the High Priest of the Temple was a secret
follower of John the Baptist, as were Pontius Pilate, Judas
Iscariot, and the Roman soldier who thrust a spear into Jesus.
All
of them had vowed to avenge John, and the Johannites subsequently
revered all of them.
Pilate in particular was an extraordinary
individual.
Very little was officially recorded about his life, but
it’s likely that he was born in Fortingall in Scotland, son of a
Druid and related to a Scottish tribal chief called Metallanus.
Metallanus wanted to establish good relations with Rome, so he sent
the sons of several prominent families to Rome to be brought up as
Romans, with Roman names.
Pilate was one of those.
The Royal Scots,
the oldest regiment in the British Army, claim to be descended from
Pontius Pilate’s bodyguard.
With his Druidic family background,
Pilate was highly receptive to the Gnostic message.

‘
The Knights Templar
were also believed to be Johannites.
Every Grand Master of the
Knights Templar took the name John.
The Catholic Church accused the
Templars of worshipping a severed head called Baphomet.
Lucy said
this was none other than John the Baptist’s preserved head.
At
their trial by the Inquisition, the Templars were accused of
trampling and spitting on the Christian Cross.
Again, this made
perfect sense according to Lucy’s theory.
Even the Templars’ famous
red cross was far from conventional.
It wasn’t a Latin cross with
unequal arms of the type that Jesus was crucified on, but a Cross
pattée with equal arms.
This allowed them to masquerade as
Christians while actually showing they weren’t Christian at all to
those who understood the symbolism.’

‘
That’s some theory,’
Gresnick said.

‘
Why are Delta Force so
interested in Lucy’s ideas?’
Harrington asked.

‘
My guess is that Lucy
rediscovered or elaborated on something the Nazis knew about the
Holy Grail,’ Gresnick said.
‘Otto Rahn, in two books
Kreuzzug gegen den Gral
–
Crusade Against the Grail, and
Luzifers
Hofgesinf
– Lucifer’s Court, had already
put forward the case that the Grail Romances were a coded reference
to Catharism.
Like her, he said the Quest for the Holy Grail was a
symbolic representation of the Cathars’ search for God.
The
Procession of the Grail Hallows was a reconstruction of the
Cathars’ most sacred initiation ceremony.’

Harrington tapped the table with his
fingers.
‘Is there any hard evidence that the Cathars wrote the
Grail stories?’

Gresnick spun his pen between his
fingers.
‘The evidence is circumstantial, but persuasive.’

‘
And what about the
theory that the Cathars and the Knights Templar were closely
related?’

‘
Again, circumstantial
but convincing.
The Templars’ main powerbase was in the Languedoc,
exactly where the Cathars lived.
Many Templars came from Cathar
families.
The Templars refused to join in with the Catholic
Church’s persecution of the Cathars even though, as elite Catholic
Crusaders, they ought to have led the attack.
In fact, they were
suspected of giving safe haven to many prominent
Cathars.

‘
The Cathars were
subjected to a savage Crusade by knights from northern France, had
to endure all the rigours of the Inquisition and were eventually
wiped out.
A few decades later, the Templars were arrested by
knights from the northern France, accused of heresy, brought in
front of the Inquisition and stamped out.
History repeats itself,
don’t you think?

‘
My grandfather was
convinced the Cathars and the Templars were created by the same
people, and, like Lucy, he thought they both traced their roots
back to the Johannite followers of John the Baptist.
The Cathars
were an overt challenge to the Catholic Church while the Templars
were more like a fifth column, pretending to be orthodox but in
fact completely heretical.
The secrecy demanded of every member of
the Templars was the perfect way to guarantee no one discovered the
truth about them.
New members were warned of the appalling
retribution that would be taken against them if they ever revealed
any of the Order’s secrets.
They’d have their tongues removed,
their eyes poked out, and their hearts taken from their chests
while still beating.’