Category: Articles

From New Dawn Special Issue 11 (Mar 2010)

Caodaism was always the favourite chapter of my briefing to visitors. Caodaism, the invention of a Cochin civil servant, was a synthesis of the three religions. The Holy See was at Tanyin. A Pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the Cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in technicolour. How could one explain the dreariness of the whole business: the private army of twenty-five thousand men, armed with mortars made out of the exhaust pipes of old cars, allies of the French who turned neutral at the moment of danger?

So writes Thomas Fowler, the disillusioned narrator of The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s 1955 novel set in Vietnam in the final months of France’s doomed struggle to hold onto its Far Eastern possession. Fowler, a British journalist covering the war, has taken the day off from his desk in Saigon to go northwest to Tanyin (actually, Tay Nim) province, where he watches a Caodaist religious ceremony.

His cynical description of Caodaism makes it sound as if this esoteric religion, founded in Vietnam in the 1920s, is nothing more than a cover for one of the many private and/or secret armies running wild in Indochina during its rebellion against France. But Caodaism is seen here only through the narrow, atheistic eyes of the embittered Fowler, and is accordingly twisted.

The real Caodaism, however bizarre its trappings, is a vibrantly spiritual faith. It is practiced today by more than five million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Australia, Canada, and parts of the US, particularly California. It announces the Tam Ky Pho Do, or Third Period of Salvation, when heaven will reveal itself directly to earth and all religions will unite in mutual understanding.

And, though it’s not even a century old, it sprang largely from the convergence of two rich and ancient cultural traditions in Vietnam: the Chinese and Indian spiritual and religious practices – i.e., Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism – that were brought to Vietnam over two thousand years ago, and the indigenous belief systems of Vietnam – i.e., the land as a place of benign, malignant, and mystical spirits; Hau Bong, or spirit mediumship in the shamanic mode – that stretch back before recorded history.

Channelling and “Saint Victor Hugo”

Two odd phrases stick out in Fowler’s description of a Caodaist ceremony that tell us unequivocally this new religion also has a jarringly modern, esoteric – even beguilingly mysterious – side. The first phrase is, “Prophecy by planchette;” the second is, “Saint Victor Hugo.”

What exactly is “prophecy by planchette?”

A planchette is the tiny, heart-shaped, three-legged marker that scurries across the letters of the alphabet written on an Ouija board and spells out words and phrases said to be communicated by disembodied spirits. It’s the descendant of the three-legged table that, placed on a larger table, with the hands of the medium and one other person lying on its surface, tapped out spirit messages by raising and lowering one leg. Such “table-tapping” was the mode of otherworldly communication preferred by the aristocrats and literati of France when, in the mid-nineteenth century, a tidal wave of enthusiasm for this occult pastime swept across the country.

And “Saint Victor Hugo?”

In 1853–1855, while in exile on the Channel island of Jersey from the dictatorship of Napoleon III, the great French author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables participated in over 100 table-tapping séances. While other political exiles and members of his family looked on, Hugo chatted with the illustrious dead such as Shakespeare, Molière, Galileo and Luther; legendary animals like Balaam’s Ass and the Lion of Androcles; abstractions like The Novel and India; spirits that had never been alive, like the Shadow of the Sepulcher and Death; extra-terrestrials from Mercury and Jupiter; and the occasional errant Jersey island ghost.

On five occasions – February 11 and 18 and March 8, 15 and 22, 1855 – the spirit of Jesus Christ (or so the transcripts tell us) held forth through the tables to the assembled guests. His subject was the coming of a “third” religion that would supersede Christianity just as Christianity had superseded Druidism (the ancient religion of Britain). Victor Hugo was to be the prophet of this new religion, which held that (1), not only do men and women have individual conscious souls, but animals, plants and stones do as well, and (2), God is in the process of bringing a “universal pardon” to our world, and in fact to every soul in the universe; even Satan will be granted amnesty.

This all sounds strangely familiar to devotees of Caodaism. Some seventy years after Hugo spoke to the spirits on Jersey, 8,000 miles away in Vietnam, the newly-aborning religion would announce itself through spirit guides as, “The Third Great Universal Religious Amnesty.” According to its tenets, God would grant a pardon to all the religions of the world and in so doing bring peace to the universe. At an historic “summit” séance in Saigon on Christmas Eve 1925, attended by members of the Pho Loan group, the powerful spirit having overall responsibility for communicating Caodaism to our world would reveal his true name and declare that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

All this would happen seventy years after the Jersey séances. Back on that windswept island in the early 1850s, the mysterious process that would somehow transmit the spirit of Jesus Christ’s channelled pronouncements to Saigon in the 1920s and elevate Victor Hugo to the status of Caodaist saint, was putting forth its roots in another direction. The séance transcripts tell us that on September 12, 1853, the “living phantasm” of Napoleon III came to Victor Hugo while the dictator was asleep. A three-hour “trial” of the channelled Emperor ensued, at the end of which Napoleon III humbled himself abjectly before the writer and apologised for the wrongs he had inflicted on Hugo and the world.

This was the last “spirit communication” with the Emperor. But Victor Hugo would never cease to attack the real, living French dictator virulently and publicly. In 1860, Napoleon III, with the British, invaded China. His ostensible motive was to protect Roman Catholicism in that country. The allies inflicted a crushing defeat on a defending army of Tatars that greatly outnumbered them but was short on modern firearms; when the battle was over, 3,000 Chinese, two British, and three French lay dead. Once arrived in Peking (now Beijing), the French and British troops spent days looting, burning and ransacking China’s Imperial Summer Palace, one of the seven wonders of the modern world. The Chinese capitulated immediately.

This piece of imperialist vandalism redoubled Hugo’s hatred of Napoleon III. He wrote, “Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar building… suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building…. One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thieving woman [Queen Victoria], or so it seems… It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry… One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.”

The Chinese would gratefully remember Hugo’s rebuke to Napoleon III. The great writer spoke out just as vehemently when, in 1862, the French Emperor invaded Cochin China, again to “protect” Catholicism. By 1869, all of Indochina had been subdued. Vietnam was now a province of the French colonial empire.

When the Vietnamese began to foment rebellion against the French in the early 20th century, Napoleon III was bitterly remembered as the author of all their woes. The Vietnamese held the memory of Victor Hugo dear; he was their defender and their friend.

The Emergence of Caodaism

The séances ended in 1855. In 1870, Victor Hugo, now free to return to France (the Emperor had been deposed), packed the copious transcripts away in a trunk. He had kept all news of the séances away from his political enemies, fearing they might hold up the transcripts as proof that he was a lunatic. The great author died in Paris in 1885. Certain stipulations in his will governed when and if the transcripts could be published.

In 1900, the energies that would create Caodaism began to coalesce around the person of Ngo Minh Chieu (1878–1932), a young Confucian scholar who joined the French civil service in Saigon in 1899. Chieu combined learning in Chinese philosophy with a knowledge of ancient Vietnamese spiritistic-shamanic traditions and Taoist Shamanism, abetting this with wide reading in nineteenth-century European spiritists such as the astronomer/psychic researcher Camille Flammarion; the founder of Spiritism Allen Kardec; Leon Denis; and probably Theosophical Society leader Annie Besant.

Transferred to Phu Quo island, the shy, now isolated adept immersed himself in mediumistic phenomena, using the Cau Co or “spirit pen” to communicate with traditional Chinese deities like the red-faced demon slayer Guan di Gong. He encountered a powerful entity that revealed itself only through the mystical name of Cao Dai Tien Ong Dai Bo Tat Ma-Ha-Tat. He was vouchsafed a vision, probably in mid-1920, of a large eye encompassed by rays of light; this was to become the “Divine Eye,” or “Left Eye of God” (Thien Nhan) that, signifying universal and individual consciousness, is a key icon of Caodaism. Arrived back in Saigon in 1924, the humble modern-day shaman/administrator drew disciples to himself as he studied how to worship Duc Cao Dai.

Now a signal event took place. In 1923, the first collection of the transcripts of Hugo’s channelling experiences – Chez Victor Hugo: Les Tables Tournantes de Jersey – was published in Paris. The volume was highly incomplete, excluding many of the transcripts of the more tradition-challenging séances. It did include Hugo’s five sessions with the “spirit of Jesus Christ.”

Available in Vietnam, and reviewed in the Saigon newspaper L’écho Annamite, the book seized the attention of the many who were still grateful to Victor Hugo. It galvanised a group of young French-speaking Vietnamese civil servants into conducting their own table-tapping experiments. Soon, a spirit calling itself Thuong-De viet Cao-Dai giao-dao Nam-Phuong, or “Jade Emperor, Supreme Deity, alias Cao-Dai, religious teacher of the Southern Quarter,” manifested to announce that it had come to “teach the truth to the people of Annam.”

The group called itself Pho Loan. It was soon instructed to switch from table-tapping to the use of the corbeille à bec (“basket with beak”). Central to this procedure was a wicker basket shaped like an upside-down crow. Four ropes were attached to the basket, each held by a different medium so that no one personality could control the communication. The basket was suspended in such a way that its “beak” could make contact with a flat, fine surface of sand beneath; thus the spirit writings were written in the sand.

On Christmas Eve, 1925, at the previously mentioned landmark séance, the commanding spirit previously calling itself A.A.A. (the first three letters of the Romanised Vietnamese alphabet) now manifested to reveal that its true name was Ngoc Hoang Thuong De Viet Cao Dai Giao Dao Nam Phuong and to affirm its reincarnational identity with Jesus Christ.

It declared:

Be joyful tonight on this the anniversary of my appearance to teach the religion in the West. Your allegiance brings much happiness to me… Soon you must help me establish the religion. Have you seen my humility? Imitate me so that you may genuinely claim to be religious men.

Now Ngo Minh Chieu, whose lived experience of mediumship would be essential to the development of Caodaism, was invited to join the group. It became apparent that he and the Pho Loan members worshipped the same supreme being.

On October 7, 1926, a spirit-dictated petition, signed by 247 Caodaists, gave the French authorities notice that a new religion had been established. The religion held that the world’s misery was caused by the disunity existing between all religions, and that its aim was to perfect the Tam Giao (“three teachings,” that is, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism) of Vietnam. The religions of the world would be brought into equilibrium.

Increasingly, spirit visitors of world stature manifested through the corbeille à bec. They included Lao-Tzu; Li Po, China’s great 8th century Taoist poet; the female Bodhisattva Quan Am; Joan of Arc; Louis Pasteur; René Descartes; Vladimir Lenin – and, very soon, Victor Hugo. Martin Ebon writes in the Introduction to Victor Hugo’s Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius’s Hidden Life:

Adherents have meticulously recorded that the first, momentous encounter with this spirit took place on April 20, 1930, at 1:00 a.m., the earthly interviewer being one Ho-Phap. A bit later, the entity said that one prominent Caodaist, Tran-Quang-Vinh, was, actually, a reincarnation of the French poet’s third son, François-Victor Hugo (1828–1873). Tran later became head of the Cao Dai Army, and eventually Minister of Defense (1948–1951) in the ill-fated government of Bao Dai. During a session of the Cao Dai’s legislative body, the deceased Victor Hugo was appointed titular head of the movement’s ‘foreign missions’, that is, its actual ambassadorial representation abroad.

In The Quiet American, Greene’s narrator Fowler fingers General Thé (the name is a pseudonym), the Caodaist Chief of Staff, as a savage and out-of-control ally of the Americans who, already in Vietnam, are attempting, through the “quiet American” Alden Pyle, to create a “Third Force” that will stand up to the French and Vietminh armies. Fowler (but perhaps not Greene) seems almost to assume that politics was the real raison d’être behind the creation of Caodaism, and that it is already badly compromised in what will become the Vietnam quagmire.

Others have wondered about this. In “Through God’s Left Eye” (Underground, Summer 2008), author Paul La Farge asks himself, perhaps with tongue partly in cheek, if some of the more obscure spirit messages might not be coded messages, detailing the movement of troops and supplies. He quotes a message from the spirit of Victor Hugo: “Yes, it’s this kind of gas, which they call hydrogen. More or less dense, which makes the healthiest part, When they say that the Spirit of God swam above the waters, It’s in that sense that the word must be understood…” Professor La Farge wonders if this bizarre message might not be “a Caodaist cipher behind which some violent activity lurked” [meaning, perhaps], “The mortar shells will arrive at midnight, by boat.”

In fact there may be elements of this in Caodaist communications. But the vast majority of Caodaist spirit messages are transparently of deep spiritual intent. In other messages, Hugo spoke eloquently of beauty, divine peace, harmony, science and wisdom. He revealed that “there are… other universes than ours in the infinite and that their creatures know not the word ‘war’.” Moreover, in these worlds “soul-power is master of human weakness.” The Hugo entity averred that “death will be vanquished by uplifted conscience. There is no difference between the living and the dead.”

Caodaism in Modern Times

Certainly, in welcoming the spirit of Victor Hugo – and of that great Resistance fighter Joan of Arc! – Caodaism had found a way of allying itself with a hidden Western tradition of anticolonialism. As the number of Caodaist adherents increased almost exponentially, multiplying the need for administrative entities, Caodaism shaped itself into three “powers.” The first – the Eight Sided Temple – consisted solely of spirits, with the 8th century Tang Dynasty poet Li Po serving at one point as “spiritual Pope” in this power. The second power, that of The Heavenly Union Temple, was comprised entirely of mediums, and served as the administrative branch. The third, The Nine-sphered Temple, inspired by the organisation of the Roman Catholic Church, was host to nine hierarchies, including adepts, student priests, priests, bishops, archbishops, principal archbishops, cardinals, legist cardinal, censor cardinals, along with the Pope; this became the executive branch. Women were early on accepted in all these roles. Caodaism’s expanding membership soon called for a church or temple. Spirit guides indicated appropriate land near the capital of Tay Ninh province. Over a twenty-year period, the Tay Ninh Great Divine Temple, with its multiple acres and numerous attendant structures, was built here, emerging as the “Vatican City” – the Holy See – of Caodaism.

The Tay Ninh temple, although neutered by Vietnam’s post-1975 communist regime and today a quasi-Caodaist theme/amusement part, remains the holiest of the Caodaist places of worship. In The Quiet American, narrator Thomas Fowler lays out for us, if sardonically, its most striking attributes. Entering the temple, he notes a famous mural on the wall:

Saint Victor Hugo in the uniform of the French Academy with the halo round his tricorn hat point at some noble sentiment Sun Yat Sen [the founder of modern China] was inscribing on a tablet, and then I was in the nave. There was nowhere to sit except in the Papal chair, round which a plaster cobra coiled, the marble floor glittered like water and there was no glass in the windows… The dragons with lion-like heads climbed the pulpit: on the roof Christ exposed his bleeding heart, Buddha sat, as Buddha always sits, with his lap empty. Confucius’s beard hung meagerly down like a waterfall in the dry season.

Unremarked by Fowler is best-known feature of the temple: the picture of the “Divine Eye,” or “Left Eye of God” that signifies universal and individual consciousness. This was the eye first seen in a vision by Ngo Minh Chieu.

In the fifth year of its existence, Caodaism boasted 500,000 members. By the 1950s, an estimated one in eight South Vietnamese was a Caodaist. The religion treated Tay Ninh province as if it were a feudal theocracy, collecting taxes for itself and maintaining a standing militia of tens of thousands of men. At the same time, the movement was beginning to splinter into a number of factions, some with marked ideological differences.

The Phnom Penh Post reporter Sebastian Strangio offers a succinct summary of the history of Caodaism from the fall of the French garrison in Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (bringing with it the French surrender) to the present:

But when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a staunch Catholic, came to power in 1955, the domestic political calculus began to turn against the Caodaists. In 1956, Diem forcibly disbanded the Caodaist militias and other nationalist rivals. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, the communists took their revenge, confiscating Caodaist property and arresting or exiling many of its leaders. Relations between the Cambodian Caodaist and the Vietnamese government were difficult during the occupation of the 1980s, but have since improved.

But despite some positive changes, rights groups and exiles say the Vietnamese government continues to ban participation in independent Caodaist factions and oversees all internal Caodaist affairs. “Undercover government agents have infiltrated the administration of Caodaism, and the religion has to function according to the government’s [rules] without respecting the current religious constitution,” said Hum Dac Bui [a spokesman for www.Caodai.org, a California-based non-profit organisation]. “The Tay Ninh Holy See has become more or less a place of tourist interest for the profit of the government and is totally paralysed from a religious point of view.”

“Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said that only the government-approved Caodaist sect is legally recognised and that those who belong to splinter groups are subject to ‘harassment, arbitrary detention, and imprisonment’.”

The persecution of Caodaists by the post-1975 Communist regime saw a steady exodus of adherents out of Vietnam. Approximately 50,000 have settled in the United States, half of them in California. There are twenty temples in California, most of them small; a temple is under construction in Garden City that will be a miniaturised version of the Great Divine Temple in Tay Ninh.

There are approximately 2,000 Caodaists in Australia today. A large temple was constructed over a period of nine years in Wiley Park, New South Wales. Like the semi-completed temple in Garden City, California, it is modelled after the Great Divine Temple in Tay Ninh.

There are currently over 1,300 Caodaist temples in Vietnam; these serve the great majority of the five million adherents to Caodaism that are spread around the world today.

All that is required in the practice of Caodaism is a vegetarian diet ten days a month and biweekly attendance at services. Doctrinal loyalty is not required. During services Caodaists bow before the Divine Eye, chant, and meditate; sometimes there are addresses. In California, as in other Western places of worship of Caodaism, séances are no longer carried out. If the spirit of Victor Hugo still hovers over this faith, no doubt he has moved on to California, where the dark-blue Pacific can remind him of the dark-blue Atlantic pounding on the shores of Jersey island, where so much of it, so mysteriously, began.

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From New Dawn Special Issue 11

So many books, articles and academic treatises have been written about the Order of Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem – usually shortened to the Knights Templar – that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction, or fantasy.

Founded in CE 1118 by a French nobleman to protect the pilgrim routes from southern Europe to the Holy Land or Palestine, it was originally a company of only nine knights. It increased in size in the next ten years until it had 15,000 warrior monks and 40,000 lay members and was the richest religious community in Christendom. Its eventual downfall and destruction was just as dramatic as the chaste Christian knights were accused of practising ‘unnatural sin’, blasphemy, heresy, and devil worship.

The sudden rise of the Templars, their considerable wealth obtained by loading their empty ships with spices, silk and other luxury goods on the journey back to Europe, and their special status within the Roman Catholic Church, brought criticism and created powerful enemies.

Even the Vatican became critical of the Order, and in 1207 Pope Innocent III denounced the knights for their excesses and for “employing doctrines worthy of demons.” A year later he issued a papal bull because the knights had refused to accept his authority and replaced it with that of their own Grand Master. In 1238 Pope Gregory IX even accused the Templars of practising heresy but no charges were brought against them.

The term “pride of a Templar” became commonplace as a description for any arrogant person. In battle, despite their religious beliefs or perhaps because of them, the Templars were renowned for their courage and ruthlessness. When sacking cities and towns in Palestine the knights showed no mercy, killing men, women and children indiscriminately so that the streets literally ran with the blood of the massacred. This was despite the fact that the Order was rumoured to have made secret alliances and deals with the Saracens. It is possible these were of the same nature as the financial deals allegedly made between some NATO troops and Taliban forces in the modern Afghan war.

In France the Templars owned large tracts of land and many properties including whole villages that they ruled as feudal landlords. The Order owed no allegiance to the French crown and paid no taxes to the states on their income as merchants and farmers. Eventually this brought them into open conflict with the French king Philip IV, also known as Phillipe Le Bel or the Fair. When he came to the throne he found the kingdom he had inherited was bankrupt. Vast sums of money had been spent in funding the crusades to the Holy Land and in real terms the Templars were wealthier than the king. At first Philip turned on the Jews as a source of income, and then he began to consider the Templars and plotted how he could discredit them and seize their assets.

To move against the Order Philip first needed to get rid of the incumbent pontiff, his arch-enemy Pope Boniface VIII. The king publicly accused him of atheism, blasphemy and immorality and in 1305 managed to get him replaced by his own puppet pope, Clement V, who ruled the Church from Avignon in France instead of Rome.

Rumours about strange activities within the Order of the Temple and their heretical beliefs had been circulating for some years. It was said they had an inner circle who worshipped a golden calf, a human head or skull, or a cat or goat-headed idol with obscene rites. Their monastic rule of chastity was apparently a sham as the knights practised the ‘unnatural vice’ of homosexuality as part of their secret rituals of initiation into the Order.

When three knights were expelled from the Order for grave misconduct and offered to inform on their former comrades, King Philip saw his chance to act. He tricked the Grand Master of the Templars, Jacques de Molay, into leaving his headquarters in Cyprus and travel to Paris on the pretence that the king wanted to discuss launching a new crusade. De Molay duly arrived at the French court bearing 150,000 gold florins and ten horse-loads of silver ingots as a gift to the king. While De Molay and his personal bodyguard were staying at the Templar commanderie in Paris, King Philip closed his trap on the Order.

On 13 October 1307 the king ordered dawn raids on the Paris headquarters and De Molay and sixty of his knights were arrested. Orders had also been issued to provincial governors all over France and simultaneously all the Templar religious houses were raided, their members arrested and, most importantly for the king’s cunning plan, their physical assets were seized by the crown.

A month later Pope Clement V meekly issued a papal bull addressed to the monarchs of Europe informing them the Templar Order had been declared heretical and they should arrest all its members in their lands. Some obeyed the papal decree but in some countries the Templars were virtually unharmed and its members were assimilated into other chivalric orders.

In total eighty-eight charges were brought against the Templars in France with the support of the pope, who in fact got involved in the legal proceedings against them. Two early charges, of consorting with women and being inclined to Islam, were dropped. However, the other charges remained, and these were that the knights had denied Christ as the saviour and redeemer of humanity, spat and trampled on the cross at their initiations into the Order, adored an unspecified idol, perverted (desecrated) the sacrament, practised ritual murder, wore a cord “of heretical significance,” performed “ritual kisses” during naked initiation ceremonies, and were traitors to the other Christian forces in the Middle East.

Knights who had been inducted into the inner circle of the Order confessed that the Templar priests had forced them to deny and renounce Christ. They were told he was a false prophet and made to spit three times on a crucifix and trample it underfoot. Some candidates were reluctant or too scared to carry out this blasphemous act and were forced to do it at sword point. Others who still refused were punished by being flogged daily and put on a ration of bread and water until they agreed.

New Evidence about the TemplarConfessions

In 2003 the historical researcher Dr. Barbara Frale was allowed access to documents previously held in the ‘secret archive’ of the Vatican library relating to the trial of the French Templars at Chinon in 1310. Known as the Chinon Parchment, this document describes the confessions of the leading Templars in France including the Order’s French Grand Master. The confessions were freely given without torture and the trial took place with Pope Clement present. Evidence was provided of the initiation rite into the Order involving spitting on the cross. However, in their defence, the knights said that this act was merely carried out as an ordeal to test the candidate’s mettle. It was to see how they would cope if captured by the Saracens and forced to renounce their faith.

One of the charges made against the Templars was that at their initiation they had to strip naked. The priest who was presiding over the ceremony then kissed the candidate on the mouth, the naval (solar plexus), the ‘base of the spine’ and on their penis. This evidence was regarded by the Inquisitors as proof the knights had broken their sworn vow of chastity and indulged in the sin of homosexuality. In fact this practice may be linked with the accusation the Templars were traitors who made pacts with their Saracen enemies. In 1166 twelve Templar knights were hanged in Jerusalem for betraying a Christian fortress in Jordan to the army of the emir of Damascus.

It was claimed the Templars had made a secret pact with the infamous Order of Assassins and also had connections with the heretical Islamic sect of Sufis. It is possible that through these contacts the Templars had been exposed to certain mystical or occult practices of the Saracen mystery schools. In these the master breathes on certain parts of the initiate’s body to stimulate the psychic centres or chakras. This practice could be easily misinterpreted as kissing.

As we have seen, the Templars were accused of worshipping a non-Christian god represented as an idol or image. This took variously the form of a human head or skull, sometimes with two or three faces, a large black cat or a goat, and even a cockerel-headed man, that has been identified by some writers with the Gnostic deity Abraxas. In fact, a figure of this description has been found on Templar seals. Descriptions of the head described it as having ‘old skin’ as if it had been embalmed or mummified and eyes that ‘flashed like lightning’. Others said it was a skull made of silver or black metal. One Templar from the Parisian commanderie said the head had a long beard and the knights knelt before it and kissed it calling it their saviour. One Irish knight said the skull had spoke and it was claimed that such oracular sacred heads were common among the Syrians.

Some have suggested the image worshipped by the Templars was the Shroud of Turin. Dr. Barbara Frale claims to have found the confession of a French Templar called Arnaut Sabbalier in the Vatican’s secret archives. In it he said he was shown “a linen cloth on which was impressed the image of a man.” He was told to kiss the feet of this image three times in veneration. Dr. Frale said the Shroud, which is supposed to be a medieval forgery, went ‘missing’ between the fall of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) in 1204 and the early fourteenth century. During this period Dr. Frale claims it was in the guardianship of the Order of the Temple.

When the idol was in the form of an image of a black cat or cat-headed god, it was associated with fertility and was supposed to bring good harvests to the farms owned by the Order. In England a Templar called Stephen of Stapelbrugge was interrogated in June 1311 and asked if he knew anything about the adoration of a cat. He replied that such an idol was not known in England but he had heard of its adoration by the Order “in overseas parts.” Some writers suggest this feline deity may have represented the ancient Egyptian cat and lion-headed goddesses Bast and Sekhmet.

One image found in a French commanderie depicted a demonic figure with a feline face, beard, female breasts, bat wings, cloven feet and horns. The 19th century French occultist Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Louis Constant) identified this figure as ‘Baphomet’. His famous illustration of it shows a hermaphrodite figure with a goat’s head, a human torso with female breasts, and goat’s legs with hoofed feet. On its forehead is a pentagram, the five-pointed Morning Star of Lucifer the Lightbearer, and between its horns blazes a candle representing the Gnostic light of spiritual illumination. Levi described Baphomet as a pantheistic image of the Absolute. Other occultists identify him with Azazel, the biblical scapegoat and leader of the Watchers or fallen angels who taught civilisation and the magical arts to early humans.

Although the persecution of the Templars was concentrated in France, the papal bull issued by Clement V to the royal heads of Europe spread it all over the Continent. The pope sent a separate letter to King Edward II of England instructing him to arrest all Templars in the country. At first the king refused to obey, even telling the pope the English Templars were innocent and remained faithful to the Roman Catholic Church. However, politics intervened, as not only was King Edward betrothed to the daughter of the French king, but he also needed the support of the pope in his struggle to keep the throne of Scotland threatened by Robert the Bruce. Reluctantly Edward issued orders to all the sheriffs in England to detain the Templars in their areas. But he commanded they should not be held in “harsh conditions” or subjected to torture.

Many English Templars had already gone underground and the sheriff of York was rebuked by the king for allowing Templar knights to “wander throughout the land” disguised in secular clothes. Because Edward had forbidden the knights to be tortured, very little evidence was gathered against them. In one case the only evidence of wrongdoing was the testimony of a young boy who said a common saying among his contemporaries was “Beware the kiss of a Templar.” Where evidence was found the knights concerned were sent to monasteries as penance and the Order’s estates and properties were seized by the crown or handed over to rival military-religious organisations such as the Knights of St John. In 1292 it was said there were still over fifty estates in England in Templar hands.

How the Templars Became Linked with Freemasonry

In Scotland the situation was more complicated due to the ongoing struggle for the throne. King Edward had to keep the pope’s approval and he did that by accusing the Templars of heresy. The first trial of the Scottish knights began in October 1309 at the royal palace of Holyrood House, but only two defendants were brought before the court and both of them were Englishmen. Masonic sources claim that when the Order was suppressed in France the Templar commander of Auvegne fled by ship with eight knights and landed at Mull in Scotland. There they allegedly joined up with other Templars who had escaped from England and the Order survived. An alternative version says the Order survived under the auspices of the Knights of St John or Hospitallers and became associated with the operative lodges or guilds of stonemasons that eventually became Freemasonry.

In the fifteenth century King James II of Scotland is supposed to have appointed Sir William St Clair of Sinclair as the “patron and protector of Scottish masons” and decreed it would be a hereditary title. Sir William is famous as the architect and builder of Rosslyn Chapel, whose unique medieval stonework has carvings of images drawn from biblical, pagan, Masonic and Gnostic sources. Rosslyn also has connections with the Scottish Templars and is said that, like King Solomon when he built his temple in Jerusalem, Sir William hired “artificers from foreign kingdoms.” In fact, the ground plan of the chapel is said to be based on that temple.

In a lecture called ‘The Origins of Freemasonry’ given in the Albert Halls in Stirling, Scotland, in 2001, the Masonic historian Dr. Robert Lomax claimed that the layout of Rosslyn Chapel was an exact replica of the third temple in Jerusalem built by King Herod and destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE. He also claimed a carving in the lower frame of the window in the south-west of the Scottish chapel depicts the first degree initiation of Entered Apprentice in Freemasonry. In the image a man is shown kneeling between pillars, the twin pillars at the entrance to Solomon’s temple and also seen in Masonic lodges. He is depicted as blindfolded with a halter or noose around his neck. The end of the rope is held by a second man who appears to be wearing the tunic of the Knights Templar with its distinctive equal-armed cross. The candidate is holding a book – the Bible? – which has an identical cross on its cover.

Dr. Lomas pointed out in his talk that the only other figure depicted in the carvings at Rosslyn with a noose around its neck is an image of Shemyaza, one of the alternative names for the leader of the Watchers or fallen angels mentioned in the Bible and the apocryphal Book of Enoch. He went on to claim from Masonic insider knowledge that William St Clair built the chapel at Rosslyn to house or conceal certain artefacts excavated by the Templars from beneath the ruins of the temple at Jerusalem. Other writers have speculated that the chapel is the repository for the Holy Grail or even the head of St John the Baptist.

It is known that when the king of Jerusalem granted land to the nine founding fathers of the Templars, they spent several years excavating under the ruins of Solomon’s temple. The tunnels they dug were re-excavated in the nineteenth century by Lt. Charles Warren of the Royal Engineers. Warren was a prominent 33 degree British Freemason who was later knighted and became the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. In that role he was responsible for the investigation, or possible cover-up, of the infamous Jack the Ripper murders in East London, which some writers claim had a Masonic connection.

Considerable speculation has surrounded the mysterious excavations made by the medieval knights under the temple. It has been claimed they unearthed an ancient buried treasure, such as gold and silver ceremonial vessels used in the original temple, and that was the source of that immense wealth. More fantastically it has been suggested they may have found the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant or the Pillars of Tubal Cain, on which were carved all the knowledge preserved from pre-antediluvian times.

HRH Prince Michael of Albany, the present claimant to the Stuart throne, believes the Templars unearthed several manuscripts saved from the fire that destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria. These allegedly contained lost knowledge on the esoteric nature of music, geometry and metallurgy. Gaeton Delaforge, a member of one of several modern occult groups who use the Templar name, has claimed the knights found relics and documents relating to the spiritual traditions of ancient Egypt and Israel.

As is well known, Solomon’s temple is extremely significant in the mythology and symbology of Freemasonry and this links it with the Templars. The Masonic initiation is based on the ritualistic murder of Hiram Abiff, the architect and master builder of Solomon’s temple, by three fellow stonemasons using the tools of the trade. Solomon himself is depicted in rabbinical legend as a sorcerer and magician who summoned and employed elemental spirits to help build the temple. His marriages to several foreign princesses is also denounced in the Old Testament where it is said he “sacrificed and burnt incense in high places” (I Kings 3:3). In fact, these ‘high places’ were the hills outside the city crowned with sacred groves dedicated to the worship of the Canaanite goddess Ashtaroth, the ‘Queen of Heaven’ and her consort Baal with offerings of spiced cakes, honey and libations of wine.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the Order of the Temple, allegedly driven underground four hundred years previously, began to emerge again under the guise of Freemasonry. In 1736 one of the most famous figures in contemporary Masonry, the Chevalier Andrew Ramsey, a Scottish supporter of the Jacobite cause and a tutor to the sons of the exiled Stuart dynasty in France, said that Freemasonry was the heir to the Templar tradition. Although Chevalier Ramsey hinted at the connection between the medieval knights and Masons, it was Baron Karl Gottlieb von Hund, who established a Templar degree within Freemasonry with the creation of the Strict Observance Rite.

Von Hund had been initiated into a Masonic lodge in Paris led by Lord Kilmarnock, the Grand Master of Scottish Freemasonry, which claimed to have inherited a Templar tradition. Von Hund said he was initiated by a mysterious masked figure known as the ‘Knight of the Red Feather’, who he later identified as Prince Charles Edward Stuart, popularly known to his Jacobite followers as Bonnie Prince Charlie. Whoever this person, he allegedly gave Von Hund permission to start a Masonic lodge in Germany working the higher degrees of Templarism.

Baron von Hund had a rival in this neo-Templar revival in Germany called Johann Augustus Starck. He claimed to have been inducted into a Masonic-Templar lodge in St Petersburg in imperial Russia. He had also made independent connections with a surviving Templar tradition in southern France connected with the medieval Cathar heresy. Starck believed the original Templars had learnt occult lore from contacts in Persia, Syria and Egypt and a secret society they had encountered while fighting in the crusades.

In 1807 a Portuguese member of the former knights of the Society of Jesus Christ, a name allegedly adopted by the Templars in Portugal and Italy when the Order was outlawed, travelled to Paris. There he is supposed to have founded a new Masonic lodge combining Freemasonry with Templarism. A rival Masonic-Templar lodge already existed in the city claiming descent from a knight who was anointed by Jacques de Molay as the new Grand Master of the Order before he was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. It allegedly owns a charter of foundation that is dated 13 February 1324.

It is difficult to establish or definitively prove any historical connection between the Knights Templar and Freemasonry. However, some Masonic historians have drawn comparisons between the three knights who betrayed the Order to King Philip of France and the three murderers of Hiram Abiff in the Masonic myth. References are also made to the assassination of a prominent Templar commander, Charles de Monte Carmel. He was murdered shortly before the suppression of the Templars and his killers concealed his body by burying it under a thorn tree, where it was found by his fellow knights.

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Bibliography

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge, Jonathan Cape, 1989
A. Bothwell-Gosse, The Knights Templars, The Co-Mason n.d.
Simon Brightman, In Search of the Knights Templar: A Guide to Sites in Britain, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006
Michael Haag, The Templars: History & Myth, Profile Books, 2008
Alexander Horne, King Solomon’s Temple in the Masonic Tradition, The Aquarian Press, 1972
Alain Demurger, The Last Templar, Profile Books 2009
Helen. J. Nicholson, The Knights Templar on Trial: The Trial of the Templars in the British Isles 1308-1311, The History Press, 2009.

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