The Avignon Quintet (34 page)

“But the silence of bewilderment or outright disdain could do nothing to help the knights in their fearful religious dilemma. They wondered, they hesitated, they compromised. Could the King be serious? Or was this a vulgar attempt by a spendthrift always in need of cash to wrest the Templar riches from them? If so, what a dangerous way of achieving his ends – for the order had a fully armed fighting force of 15,000 knights in the field: perhaps the only fully equipped and mature military order then in Europe. They did nothing. The long dreary Inquisitions into their heresies, which today cover a mountain of parchment in Toulouse, Avignon and elsewhere are extraordinarily disappointing in their lack of coherence, their ambiguities. Yet the basic fact remains that in one night, over an area of roughly 150,000 square miles a total of 15,000 persons were taken up by the authorities. There was no struggle recorded anywhere. What could have caused every single preceptory to surrender so completely? A consciousness of the innocence of the knights? A belief that an inquiry would vindicate the Order. Surprise? Yet the Templars would seem to have held every trick in their hand had they wished to resist. Their chain of fortresses, like mastodons, was impregnable, their armies were crack fighting ones. Afterwards the King, Philippe, tried to shift the responsibility to the Inquisition, saying that he had acted on their advice. But this was not true, for they were informed after the event, though they were invited to join forces with him and handle the trials in the best religious style. Nogaret had sent twelve spies into the various chapters to collect evidence against the knights. It is worth remembering that his parents had been burned at the stake as cathars by the very Templars whom he helped destroy. At any rate he ignited the pyre, so to speak, at the instigation of the King. But though the flames burned high and long there remains something mysterious and unrealised about the whole business. The truth eludes one. For example, of all the thousands of Templar knights tortured and interrogated over a seven-year span, only three confessed to homosexual acts …

“But the traditional view of the matter should be set out clearly since it is the view which holds the academic field today, and there is no inherent improbability about it. It runs as follows, and the chief proponent of it is Professor Basil Babcock of Oxford:

“‘The real sin of the Templars is far from mysterious – though it is never mentioned in the long list of 127 questions addressed to each of the knights by the Inquisition. The sin was the sin of usury, and the only rational explanation of their sudden and catastrophic fall turns upon it and upon nothing else. They were, we must remember, the most powerful and widely extended money-lenders and bankers of the Middle Ages, and their enormous wealth first grew from the fact that they financed the crusades as well as taking an active part in the fighting in order to safeguard and watch over their investments. The Temple in Paris was the focus and centre of the world gold market. The Popes and the Kings were encouraged to deposit their wealth with the Temples for safety – wealth which was not locked away in the vaults but reinvested under guarantees and at a lively percentage. In sixty years of studious banking backed up by the might of the sword and the chain of fortresses stretching across the civilised world the wealth of the Templars cast a shade over the riches of Kings and Popes alike. It exercised a strange hold on the economic pattern of Europe’s life. With riches comes cupidity, and with power insolence. So the stage was set for the downfall of the Order.’ “It is the purpose of this detailed study to suggest that there was in fact a Templar heresy, contracted perhaps in the Orient which, on religious grounds, and from the narrowest Christian viewpoint, justified their total destruction. While they were
outremer
in the service of the Cross they became contaminated with the secret gnostic beliefs which coloured their notions of good and evil and which qualified their allegiance to the Pope and Christendom. They became secret dissenters, and in the technical sense, or purely theological sense, supporters of the Anti-Christ of the day. At first sight this explanation of the mystery might seem somewhat bold and perhaps even rash. But there is enough evidence to support it, and we hope to show by a painstaking examination of available records that this is, in fact, what happened, though of course not all the knights were necessarily in the know. The Order transformed itself from within and disseminated knowledge at different levels – a sort of freemasonry in structure grew up; and naturally enough, because just to think such things, which threw the whole of Christianity into question, was extremely dangerous. They lost their gamble, and were rooted out, extirpated to the last man. Issues may have become confused, evidence tangled and muddled. But reason there was, and the present writer hopes to show it.”

Toby threw down his manuscript and tossed some more wood on to the fire. I was silent. Despite the rather heavy rhetorical flourishes it was not bad as an introduction to his book. It was at least a direct challenge to the prevailing authorities. I watched him pacing up and down, organising the dinner, with the light glinting on the gold rims of his spectacles. Memory seized me as I lay, sunk in a composed drowse, before the vast fire. Our shadows danced upon the walls and I thought of Plato, and then of Akkad. I thought of our lives, our travels, which now had diminished and faded into a kind of limbo where we had nothing much more to expect of the world. The fire burned, the whole of Provence (our own land) slumbered around us in the light of the dying moon. Toby was going grey at the temples, so was I. And the dead? They slumbered peacefully, waiting for us to join them. We ate in silence and happiness – the silence of deep thought: for the threads of everything Toby had written led us directly back to our own youth, and to Akkad and the adventures of the deserts which ringed Alexandria. I saw how the theme went now, and I could see that if Toby handled his materials with circumspection he would have a book which would not be easily superseded in its domain. He sat and riffled through it by the fire, and began to talk and expound, no longer content to read the prose in his somewhat stentorian voice.

I lay and drowsed. Some of these things I knew, and some not. I had entered, thanks to the wine, into a state of warm bemusement hovering on the borders of sleep. Yes, Avignon became Rome in 1309, just at the time of the Templar trials; Toby said: “Of course all of this I owe to that chance remark of Rob’s, and the letter from Akkad. Do you recall?” Drifting through my mind came sadder fragments from the Sutcliffe papers which I had been trying to arrange in chronological order. “Honey, Robin is all heaped up with sadness. His roses don’t sing no more. He’s all cased up in sorrow, poor Robin. He’s gone silent, he needs subtitles, honey.” Trash, with her “pretty hobbling French”…

“To get to the bottom of the matter,” Toby was saying as he scanned his huge typescript, “one must try to see what was behind the questions posed by the Inquisition. For example, those concerned with sodomy. For while sodomy was not more rare in the Middle Ages than it is today, no stigma of effeminacy attached to it. Many Crusaders must have been of that persuasion, and of course the popular revulsion to unnatural practices went deep. Indeed the penalties were hard, though almost never invoked. The charge was punishable by being burned alive or buried alive at this time. But this was only what appeared on the statute books. Yet the Jews, for example, were never charged with sexual aberrations by their medieval persecutors. One wonders why. Even the charge of ritual murder seemed to lack any specifically sexual tinge. In the case of the godless Moslems they were merely criticised for a superlative incontinence. But – and here is a fact of great significance – homosexuality was thoroughly identified with
religious dissent
of the gravest kind – so much so that Bulgar, that is to say Bogomil, remained always by connotation a religio-sexual charge – whence later
bougre
and
bugger
evolved from it. … You see?”

The firelight splashed upon his grave features as he expounded; but now his exposition was punctuated by yawns. We lay watching the climbing sparks spray the night sky. The whole of this rich elucidation of the gnostic sin – some of which I had heard or read before – went drifting through my senses like a drug, illustrated as it were by a great gallery of coloured scenes from our own history, our own encounter with the last survivors of this ancient heresy. I saw the large opaque eyes of Akkad gazing at us across the whorls of incense. The great snake, the Ophis of their beliefs, rose hissing once more to the height of a man. Toby was talking with regret of the shattered remnants of Gnosticism, of how the central faith had been shattered and dispersed by the persecution of the orthodox; riddled by schisms, weighed down under the sarcasm and hatred of the early Christians, they took to the deserts, wandered into Syria where the mountains sheltered them, or followed the gipsy trails into Europe, gaining precarious footholds in places like Bulgaria which lent them such an unsavoury name. Meanwhile the Church Fathers saw to it that all accurate documentation on their lives and beliefs was destroyed or garbled. Can they have been as vile as the orthodox believed them to be? They were, after all, the real Christians. … I could hear the voice of Sutcliffe cry
“Libido scienti!
The very albatross of unreason!” The pitiful fragments remaining can only offer us a hint of those early systems which were grouped around the basic contention, the basic grammar of spiritual dissent. Early communists like the Adamites, for example, who proscribed marriage as sinful and declared all women common property. Sex played a leading role, if we are to believe their enemies. The first conventicles were in caves, and the religious services led to mass sexual congress. Carpo-crates …; Epiphanius speaks of a sect which during secret rites sacrificed a child, doing it to death with bronze pins, making an offering of its blood. They were accused of eating human flesh – and their fire-baptism is one of human flesh turned to ashes by fire. A child gotten upon a mortal woman by a demon – our old friend Monsieur in fact. The ashes were a religious viaticum, a sacrament at birth and death alike. …

Unsavoury?

“You know very well,” says Toby, “that I have always been in love with Sabine. She has always exemplified this horrible faith to me. Rob was right to call it a grubby little suicide academy. It isn’t even a pessimism of a philosophic kind for that would be the opposite of something. It’s worse, a sort of ungraduated colourless hopelessness about the very fabric and structure of our thought, our universe. A silent anguish which rises from the depths of non-being. A flayed mind still attached to the tree, but which won’t give in, stays upright under the lash. How could an ordinary healthy man like me go in for it? It revolted everything in me, and yet without it, Sabine would not be half as perfect as she is. Yet it is thanks to her that I know what I do about the provisions made by the central members to do away with each other, since individual suicide is forbidden to them. You and Sylvie never belonged to the inner club, neither did I. But Piers did and Sabine did.”

“Is she dead then?” I was startled.

“No. I had a letter last week from her.”

“Toby are you making this up?”

“Upon my honour, no.”

“Then where do the Templars come into the picture? Surely the chief charge against them was the setting up of a false God, an idol as focus for their black masses. Where does that fit in?”

He sat watching me with curiosity for a long moment and then said: “I have been thinking a great deal about what you told me. You know the mysterious idols they were supposed to set up to worship in their chapters – were they really human heads treated with natron after the Ancient Egyptian pattern – idols of Persian or Syrian provenance? I am waiting for an answer, and it must come either from Akkad himself or from Sabine. I simply dare not go any further than that for the moment. Because of Piers.”

Of course I could see that in his mind he was thinking back to our conversation about the macabre funeral – it had shaken him as much as it had shaken me. “When they decide to join the fraternity in the full sense they agree that when their time comes, and lots are cast to determine it, they agree to be murdered by someone belonging to the chapter who will be designated for the task – but they will never know exactly who and exactly how the order will be executed. You understand, I took all this for an elaborate joke for a good while, until the facts convinced me. Those names on the so-called death-map of Piers – remember? But what he was actually trying to do with that map was to assess the probabilities, to try to guess who might have been told off to do the deed. Piers had received the little package with the straws which showed that the chapter had considered his destiny. He must have been warned that only a few months lay ahead of him – it was customary. But I suppose he was curious, excited, perhaps very much afraid. It is not agreeable to be informed that one’s time is up – whether it is a doctor or a gnostic who brings the information.”

“And the Templars?”

“Well you know, the setting up of idols and the gnostic baptism by fire – there were hints of all that; my thought is that they were of a degenerated valentinian order. The idols represented the eons, divine emanations, and their origin was probably ophite-about which we know a thing or two at first hand.”

“I see. And what about the great aerolith at Paphos which they are supposed to have worshipped under the name of Bahomet? Have you any explanation?”

“The name could be either a corruption of the word Mahomet or come from
b
à
phe metéos
, the baptism of wisdom. Why not?”

“A gnostic hint?”

“Yes. You know, Bruce, the Templars’ primitive role seems to have enjoined them to seek out and redeem excommunicated knights and admit them to the Order after absolution by a bishop. Naturally at first they gathered up a rabble of rogues and masterless men, perjurers, robbers, committers of sacrilege, who streamed into the Holy Land in the wake of the armies in search of plunder and perhaps salvation. Unlike the Hospitallers it was a military order from its very inception. The pretentions towards chastity and spartan living were very clearly defined. Plain white was their colour, plain white wool, linen undershirts and drawers of sheepskin. Their standard was a piebald one. They offered hardship, poverty and danger as the only rewards for joining them. You see, they were not joking! They were inflexible moral puritans – just the kind that suddenly breaks under certain exotic influences. Now while they were on active service in the Middle Orient they came to grips with the Assassins, a sect based in Persia which performed ritual killings under the influence of
quat
, hashish. The leader of this sect was the Old Man of the Mountains – Hassan ibn as Sabbah, whom the Templars knew well. His assassins were free-floating mercenaries who made common cause with Saracen or Druse, or any other group that took their fancy in Lebanon or Syria. But their transcendent aim was not so much the destruction of the infidel invader as that of the Orthodox Caliphate at Baghdad. But in their way they formed a sort of Moslem military order not unlike that of their Christian adversaries.