What the Knights Templar Found

I model a lot of my writing on Bronze Age and Stone Age mythology. People living today may have evolved considerably on a physical level, but I believe the biggest difference between us and our ancestors lies in our ability to store information outside of our own minds.

Writing. Records. Books. Decent filing systems. Databases.

Otherwise, we very much resemble the people who lived at the beginnings of our known history, although it seems most of us want to believe that our intelligence, our humanity, our civilization outshines cultures that practiced human sacrifice or cannibalism. We're much better than that, right? Not biologically. No. We may not be superior, but our ability to communicate is more advanced. We can share photos of our cats anywhere. Instantly. Ancient Egyptians would be SO jealous.

I think a lot about what the ancient world must have been like without information. Even before the internet, we had encyclopedias and libraries and telephones and broadcast television and newspapers keeping us from lacking knowledge of history as well as current events.

During my research for the second book in my Immortal Coffee series, which is a post apocalyptic narrative, I was ravenously devouring documentaries about Mesopotamia, where civilization began in the Western world, when I ran into the same problem.

No One Is Objective About the Origins of Human Civilization

On one end of the spectrum, you find archeologists making assertions that what cannot be proven doesn't exist, and lay persons on the other, sometimes accrediting their preconceived theories with degrees, trying to show that the evidence supports events in their religious text. Everyone has a personal agenda. Objectivity is rare regarding this region of the world, because the early myths and cultures gave rise to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.

In general, I notice the academics interviewed in documentaries tend to maintain complete skepticism and avoid acknowledging the possible historical value of the writings combined to form religious texts. They're quick to cry "Confirmation bias!" at anyone drawing a connection between an event in the Bible or Quran and archeological evidence in modern Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the surrounding regions.

Unfortunately, both parties are equally guilty of treating the writings used by current religious communities as something other than documents from an early era of human history. Avoiding those records is as bad as relying on them entirely to tell us what the world was like around the time writing was invented, in 3200 BCE. That happened in Mesopotamia. People began writing in China in 1200 BCE and in Mesoamerica in 600 BCE. People generally accept the idea that ancient Mexico invented writing independent of the ancient people of the Middle East, but people just as quickly believe that ancient China was taught. It had two thousand years to filter over there, but that distance between Asia and Alaska? Impassable!

As a writer, I like to challenge myself to imagine how people without our access to information reasoned about the world around them, and to the best of my ability, I try not to bother with historical fact. Although I have one main guideline: I assume that people living then were as intelligent as people living today. You can take that however you want.

The World Before Literacy and Public Libraries

I was watching the series Secrets of the Bible on Netflix this week. This series, produced in Britain, in some ways lacked the American passion for fundamentalist interpretation and extreme refutation of Biblical scholars. It focused less on people's conclusions and more on the journey each layman and archeologist with religious motives took to confirm evidence of the Bible. Most episodes proposed solutions to Biblical events that were contradictory. It seems everyone wants the story of Exodus to be true, unless you're an academic—then the ancient people of Israel borrowed the story from another culture, and there is no connection between the development of monotheism and an enslaved population of Semites in ancient Egypt.

I remember being amazed by the poor quality of the special effects in Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments (1956) as a child, where a pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere and somehow managed to prevent Egyptian chariots from steering their horses around it. A man with the staff and robe of a wizard performed some magic. I could hardly distinguish Moses from Merlin or Gandalf.

The actual text of Exodus referred to a god leading some recently freed Hebrews with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Cecil B. DeMille envisioned a pillar of fire in the day. No smoke. No leading. While, in fact, a better interpretation of the text may have been that the people in the story followed a massive volcanic eruption. Why not? If you'd never seen or heard of a volcano, wouldn't you mistake it for something incredibly awesome, worth investigating?

Natural wonders are sublime, because they force us into a higher awareness of our own insignificance. We marvel at the awesome forces required to create the natural world. They're beautiful. Even the destructive forces of flooding or tornadoes or earthquakes demand some respect. It stops us from thinking about the petty interpersonal disputes of our lives and places our lifetime in a broader context.

I believe we all rely on faith to interpret what we cannot explain. Many people living today firmly believe that the scientific method can and will explain everything eventually. Maybe this sounds like simple good reasoning, but it's actually just inductive reasoning. Science has provided many explanations in the past, so we can induce that it will continue to do so in the future. Unfortunately, we have to use induction to prove that inductive reasoning is valid reasoning, which is known in philosophical circles as the problem of induction. At best, it's been claimed that science doesn't rely on induction, but those arguments rely heavily on semantics. And no matter—induction works. It's just not perfect. Most people accept that the current collection of scientific theories does not represent perfect knowledge of the world. That is easy to accept. But the belief that science will eventually provide all answers, as merely a strong conviction derived from inductive reasoning, similar in almost every meaningful way to religious faith? Much less easy to accept.

I'm not trying to undermine the philosophy of science in favor of current religious belief systems. I'm trying to demonstrate that all belief systems depend on rational thinking, creative insight, and faith in uncertain theories operating within the context of the information available to them.

This is the premise for my speculation about the Knights Templar.

Who Were the Knights Templar?

Episode 11 of Secrets of the Bible was the most ridiculous of the series, because it lacked a concrete conclusion. It followed a man tracing the activities of the medieval knights established to protect pilgrims traveling from Europe to Jerusalem in 1108, then got tangled up in stories about a Holy Grail during the order's steep ascent to power, and, after their ruthless disbandment, may have merged with the Freemasons a century later.

They purportedly excavated the Temple of Solomon, which was, and still is, assumed by many to be the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock was built. This holds significance, because Orthodox Judaism believes they can have only one Temple, which is why the places where they gather their congregations are referred to as shuls, Yiddish for school. In Christianity, Jesus would have knocked over a table and gotten the attention of the authorities who killed him at this very important temple. The Ark of the Covenant would have been kept in it. It was filled with a lot of gold and statues of angels.

Devoid of human feeling, those cherubim were much more interesting angels than the harp-wielding versions popular with Christians today—I wrote them into my first novel as a product of genetic engineering.

Anyway, the episode draws a quick connection between something discovered in the Temple and the sharp increase in power of the Knights Templar. Presumably it was the Grail, but scholars know it wasn't necessarily a cup. After visiting a few cathedrals displaying the Black Madonna and talking about Freemasonry, the person interviewed for the episode concludes that the Knights Templar did indeed find something at the Temple Mount.

They found brotherhood.

What an obvious conclusion! So easy to miss! The quest for the Holy Grail was always really just a quest for spiritual enlightenment. There never was a cup of immortality that caught the blood of Jesus and held wine at the Last Supper. Nope. They dug and dug and dug and found brotherhood.

In some ways, it's a better theory than the one Dan Brown related in The Da Vinci Code. In his extremely popular novel, the great secret of European Christianity was that the Grail was a woman. Mary Magdalene. She carried the DNA of Jesus forward to our time. Real, actual descendants of Jesus are alive today. That's, um, great.

How You Could Mistake a Woman for a Chalice in Medieval Europe

Jerusalem was captured by European crusaders in 1099, and the Knights Templar formed in 1118. The first mention of a graal occurred in an unfinished romantic story about a guy named Perceval, written sometime between 1135 and 1190, maybe 1180.

It should be understood that literacy wasn't the priority in the past in the same way it is today, and a lot of time and distance separated the first mention of something like a Grail. The work written by Chrétien, who may have been a member of the Order of the Knights Templar, was clearly a fantasy story. A romantic fantasy story set in the time of King Arthur, which would have been the fifth or sixth century CE. Five hundred years before the Crusades, during the Saxon invasion.

From the original source, we can't tell what the graal is supposed to be.

In the story, a squire brings a white lance, which is bleeding, to a meal where the Fisher King is present. He is accompanied by a beautiful young girl who is carrying an elaborately decorated golden graal past Perceval, and another servant carries a silver serving platter. The room is illuminated by the contents, and they pass by him again on their way out.

The next day, a woman admonishes Perceval for not asking why the lance bled or who was served by the graal. It wasn't said to be a holy graal, and it wasn't more significant than the bleeding white lance, but whatever it was, it wounded the king in the thigh. It is implied that Perceval could have prevented the injury if he'd asked about it. The woman then tells him that she is his first cousin and that his mother is dead.

In the next known graal story, written in 1210, Parzival—not Perceval—has to go on a quest, because he did not ask the healing question. The graal is assumed in this story to have the power to heal, because if Perceval had asked about it, the Fisher King would not have remained wounded. In the Parzival story, the Fisher King gets a name, and it is explained that the wound is a punishment for taking a wife, because the person who keeps the Grail was supposed to remain chaste.

The Christian part of the story isn't added until later, by the guy who wrote Merlin, Robert de Boron. He establishes that the Grail was a vessel given to Joseph of Arimathea.

In its original, unfinished Perceval form, the popular romance—with lots of sex and many female characters—had a single mention of a bleeding lance and a golden serving dish or vessel, which is best understood as something carried by a processional salver. The beautiful woman would have been carrying some item of food tasted for poison in a vessel, and perhaps the room lights up simply because the platter is gold.

These stories were popular at the same time that the Knights Templar rose to prominence, a very secret and very powerful group of people. But if they found something at the Temple Mount in 1099 or so, it was not in the possession of the Fisher King in the fifth or sixth century CE.

What we know from other sources is that, two centuries after the conquest of Jerusalem, people claimed that the Knights Templar were denying Jesus Christ, spitting on crucifixes during their initiation rites, and worshiping idols. Specifically, they called them Baphomet, a word that may be derived from the Greek words baphe and metis, meaning absorption of knowledge. Since the nineteenth century, Baphomet has often been associated with an Egyptian goat or fertility god. This Goat of Mendes is associated with the snake in the Garden of Eden story via the Babylonian version. One way or another, the Knights Templar were accused of dismissing Christ and worshiping some form of knowledge, as if the pursuit of knowledge were a sin of some sort—maybe an original one. And fertility.

The Knights Templar were supposed to be chaste; they couldn't have physical contact with any women, including members of their own family. They gave all their possessions and wealth to the Order when they joined, which explains their increasing influence in Europe over a short period of time. Publicly, the Knights Templar erected many churches to the Black Madonna, or Black Virgin, and were said to carry many of these figures back with them from Jerusalem.

The Queen of Heaven

Uh-huh, brotherhood.

Well, I bet they found figures of Asherah. I know many people would prefer to interpret the black madonnas as a statement about race, but Semites from the region known as Canaan, depicted in Egyptian art, have light skin and light hair. Other people would say that the crusaders learned about a black goddess of wisdom from the mystic Sufis, a dimension of Islam. Of course, Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom, which is an ancient Greek personification of Wisdom, but also an important Byzantine church visited by the crusaders. They could have learned about a goddess from the Gnostics. They could have learned about goddesses from their contemporaries in Europe. Regardless of what sources they sought to increase their knowledge of a female deity, I believe they would have required a significant catalyst to adopt the concept with enough enthusiasm to erect hundreds of statues, as they did.

It seems likely to me that they arrived in their Holy Land and found at least one of the extremely common, but ancient, figures of a woman in the location where they expected to find sacred artifacts like the Temple Mount.

The Queen of Heaven. God's wife. Asherah, the Canaanite goddess, was everywhere in Mesopotamia, because no one had gone there and sat the people written about in the Bible down and explained they were supposed to have always been exclusively monotheistic since around 1300 to 1500 BCE, when Moses supposedly lived. In the early texts of the Bible, the Torah, and the writings of the prophets of ancient Israel, people are constantly trying to wipe out and destroy images of Asherah and Baal. El is often assumed to be the same as Yahweh. Lots of Canaanite gods are mentioned in the Bible. Yep, the god of Abraham was a jealous god who wanted no other gods before him, because there were a lot of other gods at the time.

I don't think the crusaders would have thought of the discovery of a female figure as heresy, but rather an expansion of their truth.

People have always ascribed to more than one system of thought or faith, and generally been more flexible than they claim. Today, people who believe primarily in science often find themselves praying as their car crashes or they face other life-threatening situations. Religious people find evidence supporting another religion and convert. Agnostics discover neo-pagan movements that allow them to experience spiritual community without supporting the larger organized religions. Many churchgoers attend services weekly, but often do so out of habit or familial obligation, while firmly convinced of the theories of science and rationalizing it with a humanistic perspective.

We are, if anything, very complicated—and so was humanity at the beginning of history, and so was the time of the crusaders.

At some point in Biblical history—Jeremiah 44:15–18, First Kings 14:23, Second Kings 17:10, First Kings 14:15, Second Kings 16:3–4, and Second Kings 17:1—the female deity who accompanied the main male deity of the Canaanite tribes was regularly translated as "the grove," and there was a big thing about her being associated with trees. While the Bible talks about the people destroying images of other deities, like the Canaanite Baal, in surges of monotheistic outrage, it seemed that a lot of people may not have been completely on board with the idea.

Figures of Asherah are still found buried all over what is today Israel and Palestine, which makes it likely the crusaders dug around and found some.

The Israelites wouldn't have been likely to destroy them anyway. Imagine you're a clergyman at a temple a few thousand years ago. You're surrounded by cherished images of your deities. Some radicals come tearing in, demanding you destroy the ones they feel are destroying society.

Okay. Imagine it's today. You're a museum director who just finished giving investors a tour of the Renaissance collection when a bunch of radicals, powerful radicals, march in and demand that you remove and destroy all evidence of Isaac Newton, because they consider his legend scientific dogma. They claim that scientific inquiry was not discovered or invented, but is one of many processes of determining knowledge, used as early as Aristotle and developed by multiple theorists across a variety of cultures. These people believe that the narrative of Newton's apple hinders human progress by creating a mythology around science, an ethnocentric distraction from the corporate bias that has increasingly driven the pursuit of knowledge, muddying science and generally bastardizing it.

Maybe you don't totally disagree with them, but what about Ibn al-Haytham? Why should the museum maintain the mythology of great, dead, European, male geniuses, as if they acted in isolation, and ascribe them godlike status? You know Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist attributed with inventing developments in engineering that we now know were recorded in earlier publications by other people of his time. He just drew them well. You sort of agree.

Right or wrong, you probably also, as this museum director, remember force equals mass times acceleration, and the story of the apple, from your childhood. You don't want to destroy the Newton collection. Instead, you hide it in the basement, where most of the items deteriorate—except that magnificent bronze bust.

Many of us maintain lingering respect for what was considered to be true, even in the face of reasonable skepticism and valid argument. We still love the stories of Newton.

To be continued.