1. The Kings of Jerusalem

Holy Blood

If we can, for a moment, attempt to avoid the fear of the often unfair label of “anti-Semitism,” we will be able admit what are otherwise well-documented realities, that so many recent events have been on behalf of Israel. Like the invasions of Iraq, or the Iran-Contra Operation. More controversial, but no less refutable, has been the role of Zionists in the creation of the United Nations, the first steppingstone to the infamous “New World Order,” and before that, to the machinations that led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which permitted Britain to offer the land of Palestine to Lord Rothschild in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But how much further can we trace these efforts? To the birth of Zionism with Theodor Herzl? To the beginnings of the debate about the so-called “Jewish Question” during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century? Is there any validity to Zionist cooperation with the dreaded “Illuminati”? Or could this plotting date to still farther back? Back to the destruction of the beloved Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD? Or by the Babylonians in 587 BC?

Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, in The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft, has proposed that Zionism is a heresy of Judaism.  In “The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism,” Hassan S. Haddad, points out: “Zionists who are not religious, in the sense of following the ritual practices of Judaism, are still biblical in their basic convictions in, and practical application of the ancient particularism of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament. They are biblical in putting their national goals on a level that goes beyond historical, humanistic or moral considerations…” He summarizes their goals as follows:

 

  1. The Jews are a separate and exclusive people chosen by God to fulfil a destiny. The Jews of the twentieth century have inherited the covenant of divine election and historical destiny from the Hebrew tribes that existed more than 3000 years ago.

  2. The covenant included a definite ownership of the Land of Canaan (Palestine) as patrimony of the Israelites and their descendants forever. By no name, and under no other conditions, can any other people lay a rightful claim to that land.

  3. The occupation and settlement of this land is a duty placed collectively on the Jews to establish a state for the Jews.[1]

 

Ever since the Crusaders established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, following their conquest of the city in 1099, and until the kingdom was finally defeated by the Muslims at the Battle of Acre in 1291, a multitude of European monarchs have used the title of King of Jerusalem, among them Otto von Habsburg (1912 – 2011), who was appropriated by the Priory of Sion mythos. Although otherwise unreliable, the Holy Blood, Holy Grail borrowed from the research of Arthur Zuckerman, who proposed that the perceived basis of the legend of the Holy Grail was the purported descent of these families from Guillaume of Gellone (c. 755 – 812 or 814), who, based on his interpretation of the twelfth-century text, the Sefer ha-Kabbalah, was the son of Makhir, an Exilarch, the exiled leader of the Jewish community of Babylon, who could claim descent from King David.

These elements are found in the 1982 best-seller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail—which was largely plagiarized by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code—whose authors claimed that the Protocols of Zion did not refer to a “Jewish” conspiracy, but to the global aspirations and plotting of a purported “Priory of Sion,” supposedly founded in 1099, which was dedicated to preserving the secret of the Grail, and aiming to establish a New World Order governed by the Great Monarch, prophesied by Nostradamus. According to the story that was concocted, the Priory of Sion were protectors of a holy bloodline of Merovingian kings who were descended from Jesus who secretly married Mary Magdalene. Borrowing from the Masonic legends of Memphis-Misraïm, the legend of the Priory of Sion associates its founding with the followers of Ormus, who moved to territory in France owned by Godfrey de Bouillon (1060 – 1100), the first Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion. It is also said to have created the Knights Templar as its military arm and financial branch. Discernible through their red hair, the secrets of the bloodline were cryptically referred to in Mary Magdalene being depicted with red hair in Da Vinci’s Last Supper, and survived among the Sinclairs of Rosslyn and the Stuarts. The legendary Holy Grail is therefore the womb of Mary Magdalene, and the Cathars and the Knights Templars the guardians of her lineage and the “true” Christianity, which the Catholic Church tried to suppress. According to Brown, the family have preserved rites of ritual sex magic over the centuries, which purportedly represent the true teachings of Jesus, but which have been mistakenly equated by the Catholic Church with the worship of Satan.

 

Kabbalah 

All fantasy? Part truth? As shown by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in The Sion Revelation, this scenario was invented by participants in an occult tradition known as Synarchism, developed in the late nineteenth century. As revealed in several volumes of Ordo ab Chao, Synarchism exercised a formative influence on the twentieth century, particularly through its association with Nazism. Paradoxically, both Synarchism and Nazism, as well as the related doctrines of Theosophy, are all based on the mystical teachings of the Jewish Kabbalah. Simultaneously, the Kabbalah is also the origin of Zionism.

The great irony is that the most anti-Semitic literature in history is the Holy Bible. The entire story from the Exodus to the Babylonian Captivity is one of repeated and harsh criticism of the Jews for their rebelliousness in failing to uphold the Ten Commandments, and worshipping the pagan gods of foreign nations. In particular, they were guilty of appropriating the worship of the Canaanite gods Baal, equated with the Sun, and his sister-spouse Astarte, equated with Venus. Most astoundingly, it is in the Bible that we find the first accusations of “blood libel,” where Jews were described as passing their children “through the fire of Moloch,” a reference to child sacrifice. This is despite the fact that the Jews were God’s “Chosen People.” At any point in time, however, they could return to God’s favor if they only abided by his commandments. Criticism was not a condemnation, but an appeal to reform. Psalm 78:10-11, 40-42, 56-57, mentions that Ephraim, meaning Israel at large:

 

   …did not keep the covenant of God; they refused to walk in His law, and forgot His works and His wonders that He had shown them… How often they provoked Him in the wilderness, and grieved Him in the desert! Yes, again and again they tempted God, and limited the Holy One of Israel. They did not remember His power… Yet they tested and provoked the Most High God, and did not keep His testimonies, but turned back and acted unfaithfully like their fathers.

 

Finally, in 597 BC, the Babylonians conquered the Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the Temple of Solomon, and carried the population into captivity in the city of Babylon, during which time an interpretation of Judaism known as Kabbalah was developed, whose practitioners were mistakenly identified with the Babylonian Magi. As Franz Cumont and Joseph Bidez have demonstrated in Les Mages Hellénisés (“The Hellenized Magi”), these so-called Magi were not priests of the Persian religion of orthodox Zoroastrianism, as has been falsely presumed, but rather of a daeva or demon-worshipping heretical version of it, influenced by the astrology, magic and numerology. As explained in The Dying God: The History of Western Civilization, these “Magi” had apostatized from Judaism, retaining a distorted interpretation of the Jews as “Chosen” people, but adapting a Gnostic interpretation of the worship of Baal, whose Persian equivalent was Mithras. As explained in the Quran, these ideas have their origin in a group of Jews during the Captivity who rejected Judaism to learn magic, which was falsely attributed to King Solomon:

 

When a messenger was sent to them [the Jews] by God confirming the revelations they had already received some of them turned their backs as if they had no knowledge of it. They followed what the shayateen [satans or satanists] attributed to the reign of Solomon. But Solomon did not blaspheme, it was the shayateen who blasphemed, teaching men magic and such things as were revealed at Babylon to the angels Harut and Marut. But neither of these taught anyone (such things) without saying; “we are a trial, so do not blaspheme.” They learned from them the means to sow discord between man and wife [love magic]. But they could not harm anyone except by God’ s permission. And they learned what harmed them, not what benefited them. And they knew that the purchasers [of magic] would have no share in the happiness of the hereafter. And vile was the price for which they sold their souls, if they but knew. [2:102]

 

Then, in 539 BC, the Jews benefitted from the religious tolerance of the Persian Empire, when Cyrus the Great in turn conquered Babylon, and allowed the Jews to return to the Promised Land and rebuild their temple, this time referred to as the Second Temple. As explained in The Dying God: The History of Western Civilization, the Magi followed the spread of the Jews not only back to Palestine, but to Greece, where they contributed to the rise of Greek philosophy, particularly Pythagoras and Plato, and to Egypt, giving rise of Hermeticism, falsely attributed to a legendary ancient sage named Hermes Trismegistus. With the conquests of the Romans, these new trends converged in the city of Alexandria, known to scholars as the “Age of Syncretism,.” Neoplatonism, derived from the thought of Plato, became the theology of the Ancient Mysteries, particularly the Mysteries of Mithras, a cult developed by a confluence of the families of the Julio-Claudian dynasty of Roman Emperors, the House of Herod, the House of Commagene in Turkey, and the Priest-Kings of Emesa in Syria. Hermeticism was the “practical” branch of mysticism, giving birth to alchemy.

What all these early occult traditions shared in common was a theology which reversed the interpretation of the Bible, such that God became an oppressor who imposed unnatural laws on humans, while the Devil was their liberator, leading them to the Tree of Knowledge, the knowledge of magic. In its Christian variety, this cult was known as Gnosticism. As outlined by Gershom Scholem, who founded the modern study of the subject, the Kabbalah refers to a set of doctrines that emerged in the last half of the twelfth century, but which had their origin in what he called “Jewish Gnosticism,” with origins among the Essenes, a mystical Jewish sect of the Second Temple period that flourished from the second century BC to the first century AD, and known as the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is with the Essenes, explained Scholem, that are found the first example of a mystical tradition called Merkabah Mysticism, around mystical interpretation of the Chariot vision of Ezekiel and the Temple vision of Isaiah.

 

Eastern Mystics 

A group related to the Essenes were the Therepeutae in Alexandria, mentioned by the Jewish historian Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE). Their existence provided later occultists to propose that through them the tradition of the Essenes had survived in the West, when disciples of Hermeticism joined the sect and then centuries later transmitted these teachings to the famous Knights Templar. The approximate details of that history were shared by Albert Pike (1809 – 1891), Civil War General and Grand Master of the Southern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, in his Morals and Dogma, long considered the “bible” of Freemasonry, providing an explanation of the origins of occult history with a level of precision and detail not seen among mainstream scholars:

 

The Occult Science of the Ancient Magi was concealed under the shadows of the Ancient Mysteries: it was imperfectly revealed or rather disfigured by the Gnostics: it is guessed at under the obscurities that cover the pretended crimes of the Templars; and it is found enveloped in enigmas that seem impenetrable, in the Rites of the Highest Masonry.

Magism was the Science of Abraham and Orpheus, of Confucius and Zoroaster. It was the dogmas of this Science that were engraven on the tables of stone by Enoch and Trismegistus. Moses purified and re-veiled them, for that is the meaning of the word reveal. He covered them with a new veil, when he made of the Holy Kabbalah the exclusive heritage of the people of Israel, and the inviolable Secret of its priests. The Mysteries of Thebes and Eleusis preserved among the nations some symbols of it, already altered, and the mysterious key whereof was lost among the instruments of an ever-growing superstition. Jerusalem, the murderess of her prophets, and so often prostituted to the false gods of the Syrians and Babylonians, had at length in its turn lost the Holy Word, when a Prophet announced by the Magi by the consecrated Star of Initiation [Sirius], came to rend asunder the worn veil of the old Temple, in order to give the Church a new tissue of legends and symbols, that still and ever conceal from the Profane, and ever preserves to the Elect the same truths.

 

According to Pike, the Templars were students of a group of “Johannite Christians,” who revered the author of the Book of Revelation, a reference to the Mandaean sect of Iraq.[2] The religion of Manichaeism was also a source of influence for the sect of the Mandeans, often equated with the Sabians.[3] The sect of the Mandeans, often equated with the Sabians, was influenced by the religion of Manichaeism, Persian prophet Mani (216 – 274 AD). According to the Cologne Mani-Codex, Mani’s parents were members of the Jewish-Christian Gnostic sect known as the Elcesaites.[4] His teachings were a fusion of Gnostic Christianity with aspects of earlier Zoroastrian and Mithraic traditions, purporting that the creator god was evil, and offered salvation through gnosis. Manichaeism thrived between the third and seventh centuries AD, and at its height was one of the most widespread religions in the world. Manichaean churches and scriptures existed as far east as China and as far west as the Roman Empire. It was briefly the main rival to Christianity before the spread of Islam.

The Mandaeans are often considered to be the same as, or related to, the Sabians of Harran, in Turkey.[5] The Sabians identified themselves deceptively to the Muslim authorities with the “Sabeans” of the Quran, to gain the protection of the Islamic state as “People of the Book.” In reality, the Sabians inherited the traditions of similar Jewish-Gnostic sects, and transmitted the traditions of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism to the Islamic world. They worshipped the planets, and were reputed to sacrifice a child, whose flesh was boiled and made into cakes, which were then eaten by a certain class of worshippers.[6]

The influence of the Sabians exerted itself on a mystical group within the Ismaili sect of Shiah Islam known as the Brethren of Sincerity. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Shia sect was founded by a Yemeni Jew named Abdallah ibn Saba who embraced Islam. It was an alleged member of the Brethren of Sincerity, Abdullah ibn Maymun, who several biographies claim to have been Jewish, who succeeded in capturing the leadership of the Ismaili movement in about 872 AD.[7] The Brethren of Sincerity significantly influenced the rise of Sufism, but most importantly, of the terrorist sect of the Assassins, led by Hasan-i Sabbah (c. 1050 – 1124), also famously known as the “Old Man of the Mountain,” who according to Masonic legend, transmitted their occult learning to the Templars. In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche wrote:

 

When the Christian crusaders in the Orient came across that invincible order of Assassins – that order of free spirits par excellence whose lowest order received, through some channel or other, a hint about that symbol and spell reserved for the uppermost echelons alone, as their secret: “nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Now that was freedom of the spirit, with that, belief in truth itself was renounced.[8]

 

Baghdad, with its Jewish population of approximately 40,000, was the focal point of the world-wide Jewish community of the Middle Ages. They were ruled by an “Exilarch,” referring to the leaders of the Jewish community who held an office traditionally assigned to a hereditary family tracing their lineage to King David through the Persian and Muslim Empires until the eleventh century AD. The Exilarch was depicted as Nasi, a Hebrew title meaning “prince” in Biblical Hebrew.[9] During the Second Temple period, the Nasi was the highest-ranking member and president of the Sanhedrin. Some had considerable power, similar to that of the Exilarch, especially the nesi’im of Israel, Syria, and Egypt.

The Kabbalists of Germany and Southern France shared a claim of Davidic descent through the Kalonymus, a prominent Jewish family in Lucca in Italy, descendants of an exilarch from Babylon, who settled in the German Rhineland.[10] Ashkenaz in the Book of Genesis was the son of Gomer was an ally of Gog, the chief of the land of Magog. The name Ashkenazi is thought to be derived from Ashkuza, the name given to the Scythians by the ancient Akkadians, and to be related to Ascanius, legendary king of Alba Longa and the son of the Trojan hero Aeneas.[11] By the high medieval period, Talmudic commentators began to use Ashkenaz to designate Germany, especially in the Rhineland communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, the most important Jewish communities arose.[12]

The story of the Kalonymus parallels an account by Abraham ibn Daud in his Sefer ha-Kabbalah, written about 1161 AD, that Charlemagne had appointed Makhir, a Babylonian-Jewish scholar, perhaps the Exilarch of the Jews of Babylon, at the end of the eighth century as ruler of a Jewish principality in Narbonne in Southern France. As late as 1143, Peter the Venerable of Cluny, in an address to Louis VII of France, condemned the Jews of Narbonne who claimed to have a king residing among them. The place of residence of the Makhir family at Narbonne was designated in official documents as Cortada Regis Judæorum.[13] According to Golb:

 

This dynastic line, the first of whose members was an eminent personality named Makhir, retained its power and wealth throughout the Middle Ages and until the beginning of the fourteenth century, many of its members were named Todros or Qalomynus. In establishing this office, the Carolingians clearly intended to stabilize and legally to protect the many Jewish communities in this part of their realm.[14]

 

According to Arthur Zuckerman, Guillaume of Gellone was the son of Alda or Aldana and Theodoric, or Thierry, the name assumed by Rabbi Makhir.[15] In the Medieval romances, Thierry is called Aymery. Zuckerman further proposed that Makhir is to be identified with a Maghario, Count of Narbonne, and in turn with an Aymeri de Narbonne, whom heroic poetry marries to Alda or Aldana, daughter of Charles Martel, becoming the father of Guillaume of Gellone. According to Zuckerman, where the Sefer ha-Kabbalah of Abraham ibn Daud states that Makhir and his descendants were “close” with Charlemagne and all his descendants, it could be taken to mean they were inter-related.[16] Guillaume also ruled as count of Toulouse, duke of Aquitaine, and marquis of Septimania. Deemed to be of Davidic descent, he was later beatified as a saint. As explained by Edward Gelles, in The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History, Guillaume’s “Christian descendants number many royal and noble families, including those of William the Conqueror and of some of his followers, the Dukes of Guise and Lorraine, Habsburg Lorraine and d’Este and many others.”[17]

 

Princes Crusade 

Zionists attempts to claim to the Holy Land have their origin in the First Crusade, also known as the Princes’ Crusade, a military expedition led by various leading members of European aristocracy, and whose descendants continued to claim the title of Kings of Jerusalem, even until the present day. Through the Dukes of Normandy, in addition to the House of Anjou of France, thus producing the Plantagenets of England, Guillaume of Gellone’s ancestors thus formed the backbone of the family networks who sponsored the Princes’ Crusade. The First Crusade (1095 – 1099) was called for at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, by Pope Urban II (c. 1035 – 1099), who declared:

 

Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. That land which as the Scripture says “floweth with milk and honey,” was given by God into the possession of the children of Israel Jerusalem is the navel of the world; the land is fruitful above others, like another paradise of delights.[18]

 

Urban II was a former monk of the Abbey of Cluny, founded in 910 AD by William I of Aquitaine (875 – 918), who was a member of the important network of Grail families who were descended from Guillaume of Gellone. In 925, William I of Aquitaine nominated Berno (c. 850 – 927) as the first Abbot of Cluny, who placed the monastery under the Benedictine rule. Berno was subject to Pope Sergius III (c. 860 − 911), whose rule is known as the Saeculum obscurum (“the dark age/century”), or the “pornocracy” (“rule of prostitutes”), by German historians of the nineteenth century, due to his association with his mistress Marozia (c. 890 – 937), and her family the Theophylacti, their relatives and allies, whose descendants controlled the papacy for the next hundred years. Marozia was the mother of Pope John XI, and ancestress of Popes Benedict VIII, John XIX, Benedict IX.

In his Divine Comedy, the Italian poet Dante (c. 1265 – 1321) placed Guillaume of Gellone in Paradise next to Godfrey of Bouillon. In 1087, Emperor Henry IV confirmed Godfrey of Bouillon as Duke of Lower Lorraine. Along with his brothers Eustace III (c. 1050 – c. 1125) and Baldwin of Boulogne (1060s – 1118), Godfrey joined the First Crusade in 1096. Ultimately, the Princes’ Crusade not only succeeded in the recapture of Anatolia, but also conquered the Holy Land, and culminated in July 1099 in the re-conquest of Jerusalem and the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted for almost two hundred years, until the siege of Acre in 1291. When Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse (c. 1041 – 1105) declined the offer to become ruler of the new Kingdom of Jerusalem, Godfrey accepted the role and secured his kingdom by defeating the Muslim Fatimids at Ascalon a month later, bringing the First Crusade to an end. He died in July 1100, and was succeeded by his brother Baldwin as King of Jerusalem.

Around 1119, ten years after the conquest of Jerusalem, the French knight Hugues de Payens (c. 1070 –1136), a vassal of the Hugh, Count of Champagne (c. 1074 – c. 1125), approached Godfrey’s cousin, Baldwin II (c. 1075 – 1131), who succeed Baldwin I as King of Jerusalem, with the proposal of creating a monastic order for the protection of pilgrims. The order was founded with about nine knights including Godfrey de Saint-Omer and André de Montbard (c. 1097 – 1156). Baldwin II granted the knights a headquarters in a wing of the royal palace on the Temple Mount in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque, above what was believed to be the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. The knights called themselves Milites Christi, soldiers of Christ, but because their first Convent was a part of the palace of the king of Jerusalem, which was supposed to have been built close by the place where once Solomon’s temple stood, they became traditionally known as the Knights of the Temple, or the Templars.

Hugh, Count of Champagne, frequently received as an honored guest the famous Jewish theologian Rashi de Troyes (1040 – 1105), the greatest alumnus of the Kalonymus academy in Mainz, and was reputedly descended from the royal line of King David.[19] There is a legend recounted in Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah by Gedaliah ibn Yahya (1526 – 1587), Godfrey de Bouillon purportedly connected to the Davidic bloodline, visited Rashi to ask him advice about his attempt to lead the First Crusade. Rashi was the author of complete commentaries on the Bible and on the Babylonian Talmud, and famously, his first comment on the first verse of Genesis, which might be the best-known exegesis of the Torah, asserts the God-given right of the Jewish people to possess the Land of Israel:

 

Rabbi Isaac said: The Torah should have begun with the verse, “This month shall be to you the first of months” (Exodus 12:2) which was the first commandment given to Israel. Why then did it begin with, “In the beginning”? It began thus because it wished to convey the idea contained in the verse (Psalm 111:6), “The power of His acts He told to His people, in order to give them the estate of the nations.” So that if the nations of the world will say to Israel, “You are robbers because you took by force the land of the seven nations,” Israel might reply to them, “The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He. He created it and gave it to them, and by His will He took it from them and gave it to us.[20]

 

A member of Rashi’s famous Yeshiva, founded in 1070 in Troyes, collaborated with of Stephen Harding (c. 1060 – 1134), the abbot of Citeaux in Burgundy to produce the Harding Bible.[21] During the Middle Ages, Burgundy was home to some of the most important Western churches and monasteries, including those of Cluny, Cîteaux, and Vézelay. Jews living in the region of Cluny, notably in Chalon-sur-Saône, had transactions with the abbey, lending money to it to ensure the security of religious objects. Peter the Venerable, opposed the practice, and the Statutes of Cluny of 1301 expressly forbade borrowing from Jews.[22] Prior to founding the Cistercian Order, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153), the patron of the Templars, sought the counsel of Harding and decided to enter his order of Citeaux. Cîteaux had four daughter houses: Pontigny, Morimond, La Ferté and Clairvaux. It was Hugh of Champagne who in 1115 granted lands to Bernard to found the Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux.[23]

 

Baphomet

The pupils of the early Kabbalists coming from Spain to study in the Talmudic academies of southern France were the principal agents of the Kabbalah’s transplantation to that country, where they were responsible for the production of a text that drew on the Bahir, the Sefer ha Zohar, or Book of Light, the most important medieval Kabbalistic text. It was likely while conducting excavations beneath the site of the old Temple of Jerusalem that the Templars discovered the contents of the Sefer ha Bahir, which gave rise to the development of the Kabbalah in the last half of the thirteenth century.

There are many legends about the source of the Templars’ wealth. According to Masonic legend, when the Templars came under trial in 1301, their leader de Molay arranged for them to return to Scotland, where, according to Masonic lore, they had brought with them a number of “Syriac Christians,” who were “rescued” from the Holy Land, thus inaugurating the traditions of Scottish Rite Freemasonry. These “Syriac Christians” were to have been inheritors of the doctrines of the Essenes, and influenced to the religion of Manichaeism, which was connected to the cult of the Mandaeans—also recognized as the Sabians—or the radical Ismaili sect of the Assassins of the Islamic world. According to Pike, the Templars were students of a group of “Johannite Christians,” who revered the author of the Book of Revelation, a reference to the Mandaean sect of Iraq.[24]

It may have been in an attempt to recover the lost treasures of Israel that the First Crusade was instigated. The Crusaders referred to the Al-Aqsa Mosque as Solomon’s Temple, and therefore took the name of Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, or “Templar” knights. According to Masonic histories, the aim of the Templars was to find the underground vaults constructed beneath the First Temple and to recover the vast treasures that Saint Bernard believed were hidden there, before Jerusalem was pillaged by Titus and the Roman army in 70 AD. Detailed lists of the temple treasures are included in the Copper Scroll discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Templars also intended to recover the Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten Commandments, as well as the Tables of Testimony, the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments.[25]

In 1867, a group of Freemasons including Captain Charles Wilson (1836 – 1905), Lieutenant Charles Warren (1840 – 1927), and a team of Royal Engineers from the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF), re-excavated the area and uncovered tunnels extending vertically from the Al Aqsa mosque, for some 25 meters, before fanning out under the Dome of the Rock, which is generally thought to be the site of King Solomon’s temple. Crusader artefacts found in these tunnels attest to Templar involvement. More recently, a team of Israeli archaeologists, intrigued by the Warren and Wilson discovery, reinvestigated the passage and concluded that the Templars did in fact excavate beneath the Temple.[26]

The Gnostic content of the legends of the Holy Grail is associated with the spread of the influence of the Bahir in Southern France, centered in Septimania, which became known as the Languedoc, which contributed to the emergence of the heretical sect of the Cathars, who were associated with the Templars. In Jewish Influences on Christian Reform Movements, Louis I. Newman concludes:

 

…that the powerful Jewish culture in Languedoc, which had acquired sufficient strength to assume an aggressive, propagandist policy, created a milieu wherefrom movements of religious independence arose readily and spontaneously. Contact and association between Christian princes and their Jewish officials and friends stimulated the state of mind which facilitated the banishment of orthodoxy, the clearing away of the debris of Catholic theology. Unwilling to receive Jewish thought, the princes and laity turned towards Catharism, then being preached in their domains.[27]

 

According to Marsha Keith Schuchard, the Templars adopted the Second Temple mysticism that would later feature in Freemasonry, principally from three leading Jewish Kabbalists from Spain: Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Abraham bar Hiyya (c. 1070 – 1136 or 1145) and his student Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (1089 – c. 1167), who were the leading influences behind the mystical tendencies of the Ashkenazi Hasidim, and the leading exponents of the Golden Age of Jewish culture in Spain.[28] Bar Hiyya, also known as Abraham Savasorda, was a Jewish mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who resided in Barcelona, and was given high official status by the Templars when they came to Spain to fight a crusade against the Muslims.[29] While the Sefer Yetzirah and Merkabah were among the main sources of the Bahir, certain medieval sources had an influence as well, such as a treatise by bar Hiyya.[30] According to Joseph Dan, the author of the Bahir also displayed some awareness of work of Ibn Ezra, one of the most distinguished Jewish biblical commentators and philosophers of the Middle Ages.[31]

Mystical tradition also purports that the Zohar was based on an earlier “Arabic Kabbalah” of the Brethren of Sincerity.[32] Isaac the Blind (c. 1160 – 1235), who widely suspected of being the author of the Bahir, and son of Abraham ben David (c. 1125 – 1198), a father of Kabbalah, was a pivotal figure among the thirteenth century Kabbalists of the Languedoc, and studied not only Jewish, but also early Greek, and Christian Gnostic writings, as well as the Brethren of Sincerity. The philosopher who most personified the interweaving of Judaism and Islam was the Ibn Gabirol, an important eleventh-century Jewish Neoplatonist known to the West as Avicebron, assimilated ideas from the Brethren of Sincerity to such an extent that it was his primary source of inspiration after the Bible.[33]

An additionally proposed source were the Sabians of Harran.[34] Masonic authors Rev. C.H. Vail and John Parker claimed that the Manichean sect operated under many different names, including Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars, but “always a secret society, with degrees, distinguished by signs, tokens, and words like Freemasonry.”[35] As confirmed by Malcolm Lambert, “That there was a substantial transmission of ritual and ideas from Bogomilism to Catharism is beyond reasonable doubt.”[36] The Gnostic doctrine of the Bogomils, meaning in Slavonic “friends of God,” maintained that God had two sons, the elder Satanael and the younger Jesus. Nicetas Choniates, a Byzantine historian of the twelfth century, thus described the Bogomils as, “considering Satan powerful they worshipped him lest he might do them harm.”[37]

The Church charged the Cathars with devil worship, human sacrifice, cannibalism, incest, homosexuality and celebrating the Black Mass. Walter Map, in his De Nugis Curialium, described the Publicani, a sect similar to the Cathars who had sent missionaries from Germany to England, as worshipping Satan in rituals involving the “obscene kiss,” very similar to the Sabbaths later attributed to the witches:

 

About the first watch of the night… each family sits waiting in silence in each of their synagogues; and there descends by a rope which hangs in their midst a black cat of wondrous size. On sight of it they put out the lights and do not sing or distinctly repeat hymns, but hum them with closed teeth, and draw near to the place where they saw their master, feeling after him and when they have found him they kiss him. The hotter the feelings the lower their aim; some go for his feet, but most for his tail and privy parts. Then as though this noisome contact unleashed their appetites, each lays hold of his neighbor and takes his fill of him or her for all he is worth.[38]

 

On November 1307, Pope Clement V, who had come under strong pressure from Philip le Bel, ordered the arrest of the Templars in every country. The popular narrative is that Philip was driven by greed, and that the accusations were concocted through the use of torture. As detailed by Michael Barber in The Trial of the Templars, though some Templars were in fact tortured, some were not, but “all stressed that their confessions had been freely made and were not a consequence of this ill treatment.”[39] All confessions were consistent, and repeated the accusations made formerly against the Cathars. Among the accusations against the Templars were those of practicing witchcraft, denying the tenets of the Christian faith, spitting or urinating on the cross during secret rites of initiation, worshipping the devil in the shape of a black cat, of practicing the “obscene kiss” and committing acts of sodomy and bestiality. The Templars were also charged with worshipping a skull or head called Baphomet and anointing it with blood or the fat of unbaptized babies.

 

 

 

 

 


[1] Hassan S. Haddad. “The Biblical Bases of Zionist Colonialism.” Journal of Palestine Studies, 3, 4 (1974), pp. 98–99.

[2] Morals and Dogma.

[3] Ethel Stefana Drower. The Haran Gawaita and the Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa (Biblioteca Apostolica Vatican, 1953).

[4] Werner Sundermann. “Mani.” Encyclopædia Iranica (Encyclopædia Iranica Foundation, 2009).

[5] Charles Häberl. The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr (Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009). p. 18. , p. 1

[6] David Margoliouth. “Harranians,” Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.

[7] Bernard Lewis. The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 104.

[8] Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morality (Hackett Publishing, 1998), p. 109.

[9] Geoffrey Herman. A Prince Without a Kingdom: The Exilarch in the Sasanian Era (Mohr Siebeck, 2012), p. 211.

[10] Louis Ginzberg. “Aaron ben Samuel ha-Nasi (called also Abu Aaron ben Samuel ha-Nasi of Babylonia).” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[11] R.W.M. Vindication of the Mosaic Ethnology of Europe. Primitive or Japhetic Europe; its race, language and topography (Wertheim, Macintosh and Hunt, 1863), p. 15; An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present; Compiled from Original Authors and Illustrated with Maps, Cuts, Notes, Chronological and Other Tables, Volume 3 (Symon, 1738), p. 827.

[12] Michael Brenner. A short history of the Jews (Princeton University Press 2010).

[13] Gustave Saige. Les Juifs du Languedoc antérieurement au XIVe siècle (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1881), p. 44.

[14] Norman Golb. The Jews in Medieval Normandy: A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 15.

[15] Arthur J. Zuckerman. A Jewish Princedom in Feudal France, 768-900 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1972).

[16] Ibid.

[17] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition), p. 57.

[18] Robert the Monk. Historia Hierosolymitana.

[19] Karen Ralls. The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest (Quest Books, 2003), p. 38.

[20] Rashi Bereishit 1:1.

[21] Aryeh Grabois. “The Hebraica Veritas and Jewish-Christian Intellectual Relations in the Twelfth Century.” Speculum, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Oct., 1975), pp. 618.

[22] Bernhard Blumenkranz. “Cluny, France.” Jewish Encyclopedia.

[23] Samuel John Eales. A St. Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux (Society for promoting Christian knowledge, 1890), p. 38.

[24] Morals and Dogma.

[25] “Freemasonry and the Holy Grail.” Masonic Trowel. Retrieved from http://www.themasonictrowel.com/books/the_square_and_compasses_falconer/files/chapter_43.htm

[26] M. Ben-Dov. In the Shadow of the Temple (Harpercollins, 1985), p. 347.

[27] Louis I. Newman. Jewish Influences on Christian Reform Movements (Columbia University Press, 1925) p. 142-43.

[28] Scholem. Kabbalah, p. 38.

[29] Schuchard. Restoring the Temple of Vision, p. 44.

[30] Sefer Hegyon ha-Nefesh, ed. G. Wigoder, (Jerusalem, 1969), as cited in Joseph Dan (ed.). The Early Kabbalah (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 28.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Tom Block, “Towards an Understanding of the Jewish/Sufi,” Speech to the Jewish Community Relations Council, Ratner Museum, May 2, 2007 [http://www.tomblock.com/published/shalom_jewishsufi2.php]

[33] Richard Gottheil, Stephen S. Wise, Michael Friedländer. “Ibn Gabirol, Solomon ben Judah (Abu Ayyub Sulaiman bin Yahya ibn Jabirul.” Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/7991-ibn-gabirol-solomon-ben-judah-abu-ayyub-sulaiman-ibn-yahya-ibn-jabirul

[34] Deutsch. The Gnostic Imagination, p. 123.

[35] John Yarker. The Kneph. Vol V, No 4. Cited in Bernard H. Springett. Secret Sects of Syria and Babylon (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1923), p. 289.

[36] Malcolm Lambert. The Cathars (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 31.

[37] cited in Wesbter. Secret Societies and Subversive Sects, p. 64.

[38] Jeffrey Richards. Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (Routledge, 2013) p. 60-61.

[39] Malcolm Barber. The Trial of the Templars. Second edition (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 120.

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