Holy Blood, Holy Grail (7 page)

What were these men doing? What was the purpose of their hazardous escape, which entailed such risk to both the garrison and the hostages? On the next day they could have walked freely out of the fortress, at liberty to resume their lives. Yet for some unknown reason, they embarked on a perilous nocturnal escape which might easily have entailed death for themselves and their colleagues.

According to tradition, these four men carried with them the legendary

Cathar treasure. But the Cathar treasure had been smuggled out of Montsegur three months before. And how much “treasure’, in any case

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how much gold, silver or coin could three or four men carry on their backs, dangling from ropes on a sheer mountainside? If the four escapees were indeed carrying something, it would seem clear that they were carrying something other than material wealth.

What might they have been carrying? Accoutrements of the Cathar faith perhaps books, manuscripts, secret teachings, relics, religious objects of some kind; perhaps something which, for one reason or another, could not be permitted to fall into hostile hands. That might explain why an escape was undertaken an escape that entailed such risk for everyone involved.

But if something of so precious a nature had, at all costs, to be kept out of hostile hands, why was it not smuggled out before? Why was it not smuggled out with the bulk of the material treasure three months previously? Why was it retained in the fortress until this last and most dangerous moment?

The precise date of the truce permitted us to deduce a possible answer to these questions. It had been requested by the defenders, who voluntarily offered hostages to obtain it. For some reason, the defenders seem to have deemed it necessary even though all it did was delay the inevitable for a mere two weeks.

Perhaps, we concluded, such a delay was necessary to purchase time. Not time in general, but that specific time, that specific date. It coincided with the spring equinox -and the equinox may well have enjoyed some ritual status for the Cathars. It also coincided with Easter. But the Cathars, who questioned the relevance of the Crucifixion, ascribed no particular importance to Easter. And yet it is known that a festival of some sort was held on March 14th, the day before the truce expired.” There seems little doubt that the truce was requested in order that this festival might be held. And there seems little doubt that the festival could not be held on a date selected at random. It apparently had to be on March 14th. Whatever the festival was, it clearly made some impression on the hired mercenaries some of whom, defying inevitable death, converted to the Cathar creed.

Could this fact hold at least a partial key to what was smuggled out of

Montsegur two nights later? Could whatever was smuggled out then have been necessary, in some way, for the festival on the 14th? Could it

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somehow have been instrumental in persuading at least twenty of the defenders to become parfaits at the last moment? And could it in some fashion have ensured the subsequent collusion of the garrison, even at the risk of their lives? If the answer is yes to all these questions, that would explain why whatever was removed on the 16th was not removed earlier in January, for example, when the monetary treasure was carried to safety. It would have been needed for the festival. And it would then have had to be kept out of hostile hands.

The Mystery of the Cathars

As we pondered these conclusions, we were constantly reminded of the legends linking the Cathars and the Holy Grail.8 We were not prepared to regard the

Grail as anything more than myth. We were certainly not prepared to assert that it ever existed in actuality. Even if it did, we could not imagine that a cup or bowl, whether it held Jesus’s blood or not, would be so very precious to the Cathars for whom Jesus, to a significant degree, was incidental. Nevertheless, the legends continued to haunt and perplex us.

Elusive though it is, there does seem to be some link between the Cathars and the whole cult of the Grail as it evolved during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A number of writers have argued that the Grail romances -those of Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, for example are an interpolation of Cathar thought, hidden in elaborate symbolism, into the heart of orthodox Christianity. There may be some exaggeration in that assertion, but there is also some truth. During the

Albigensian Crusade ecclesiastics fulminated against the Grail romances, declaring them to be pernicious, if not heretical. And in some of these romances there are isolated passages which are not only highly unorthodox, but quite unmistakably dualist in other words, Cathar.

What is more, Wolfram von Eschenbach, in one of his Grail romances, declares that the Grail castle was situated in the Pyrenees an assertion which Richard Wagner, at any rate, would seem to have taken literally.

According to Wolfram, the name of the Grail castle was Munsalvaesche -

a

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Germanicised version apparently of Montsalvat, a Cathar term. And in one of Wolfram’s poems the lord of the

Grail castle is named Perilla. Interestingly enough, the lord of Mpntsegur was Raimon de Pereille whose name, in its Latin form, appears on documents of the period as Perilla.9

If such striking coincidences persisted in haunting us, they must also, we concluded, have haunted Sauniere -who was, after all, steeped in the legends and folklore of the region. And like any other native of the region, Sauniere must have been constantly aware of the proximity of Montsegur, whose poignant and tragic fate still dominates local consciousness. But for Sauniere the very nearness of the fortress may well have entailed certain practical implications.

Something had been smuggled out of Montsegur just after the truce expired.

According to tradition, the four men who escaped from the doomed citadel carried with them the Cathar treasure. But the monetary treasure had been smuggled out three months earlier. Could the Cathar

‘treasure’, like the ‘treasure’ Sauniere discovered, have consisted primarily of a secret? Could that secret have been related, in some unimaginable way, to something that became known as the Holy Grail? It seemed inconceivable to us that the

Grail romances could possibly be taken literally.

In any case, whatever was smuggled out of Montsegur had to have been taken somewhere. According to tradition, it was taken to the fortified caves of

Ornolac in the Ariege, where a band of Cathars was exterminated shortly after. But nothing save skeletons has ever been found at Ornolac. On the other hand, Rennes-leChateau is only half a day’s ride on horseback from

Montsegur. Whatever was smuggled out of Montsegur might well have been brought to Rennes-leChateau, or, more likely, to one of the caves which honeycomb the surrounding mountains. And if the ‘secret’ of Montsegur was what Sauniere subsequently discovered, that would obviously explain a great deal.

In the case of the Cathars, as with Sauniere, the word ‘treasure’ seems to hide something else knowledge or information of some kind. Given the tenacious adherence of the Cathars to their creed and their militant antipathy to Rome, we wondered if such knowledge or

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information (assuming it existed) related in some way to Christianity

-to the doctrines and theology of Christianity, perhaps to its history and origins. Was it possible, in short, that the Cathars (or at least certain Cathars) knew something -something that contributed to the frenzied fervour with which

Rome sought their extermination? The priest who had written to us had referred to

‘incontrovertible proof’. Could such ‘proof’ have been known to the Cathars?

At the time, we could only speculate idly. And information on the Cathars was in general so meagre that it precluded even a working hypothesis. On the other hand our research into the Cathars had repeatedly impinged on another subject, even more enigmatic and mysterious, and surrounded by evocative legends. This subject was the Knights Templar.

It was therefore to the Templars that we next directed our investigation.

And it was with the Templars that our inquiries began to yield concrete documentation, and the mystery began to assume far greater proportions

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than we had ever imagined. 3 The Warrior Monks

To research the Knights Templar proved a daunting undertaking. The voluminous quantity of written material devoted to the subject was intimidating; and we could not at first be sure how much of this material was reliable. If the Cathars had engendered a welter of spurious and romantic legend, the mystification surrounding the Templars was even greater.

On one level they were familiar enough to us the fanatically fierce warrior-monks, knight-mystics clad in white mantle with splayed red cross, who played so crucial a role in the Crusades. Here, in some sense, were the archetypal crusaders the storm-troopers of the Holy Land, who fought and died heroically for Christ in their thousands.

Yet many writers, even today, regarded them as a much more mysterious institution, an essentially secret order, intent on obscure intrigues, clandestine machinations, shadowy conspiracies and designs. And there remained one perplexing and inexplicable fact. At the end of their two-century-long career, these white garbed champions of Christ were accused of denying and repudiating

Christ, of trampling and spitting on the cross.

In Scott’s Ivanhoe the Templars are depicted as haughty and arrogant bullies, greedy and hypocritical despots shamelessly abusing their power, cunning manipulators orchestrating the affairs of men and kingdoms. In other nineteenth-century writers they are depicted as vile satanists, devil-worshippers, practitioners of all manner of obscene, abominable and/or heretical rites. More recent historians have been inclined to view them as hapless victims, sacrificial pawns in the high-level political manoeuvrings of Church and state. And there are yet other writers, especially in the tradition of

Freemasonry, who regard the Templars as mystical adepts and initiates,

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custodians of an arcane wisdom that transcends Christianity itself.

Whatever the particular bias or orientation of such writers, no one disputes the heroic zeal of the Templars or their contribution to history.

Nor is there any question that their order is one of the most glamorous and enigmatic institutions in the annals of Western culture. No account of the

Crusades or, for that matter, of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries will neglect to mention the Templars. At their zenith they were the most powerful and influential organisation in the whole of Christendom, with the single possible exception of the papacy.

And yet certain haunting questions remain. Who and what were the Knights

Templar? Were they merely what they appeared to be, or were they something else?

Were they simple soldiers on to whom an aura of legend and mystification was subsequently grafted? If so, why? Alternatively was there a genuine mystery connected with them? Could there have been some foundation for the later embellishments of myth?

We first considered the accepted accounts of the Templars the accounts offered by respected and responsible historians. On virtually every point these accounts raised more questions than they answered. They not only collapsed under scrutiny, but suggested some sort of ‘cover-up’. We could not escape the suspicion that something had been deliberately concealed and a ‘cover story’ manufactured, which later historians had merely repeated.

Knights Templar The Orthodox Account

So far as is generally known, the first historical information on the Templars is provided by a Frankish historian, Guillaume de Tyre, who wrote between 1175 and 1185. This was at the peak of the Crusades, when Western armies had already conquered the Holy Land and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem or, as it was called by the Templars themselves, “Outremer’, the “Land Beyond the Sea’. But by the time Guillaume de Tyre began to write, Palestine had been in Western hands for seventy years, and the Templars had already been in existence for

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more than fifty. Guillaume was therefore writing of events which predated his own lifetime events which he had not personally witnessed or experienced, but had learnt of at second or even third hand. At second or third hand and, moreover, on the basis of uncertain authority. For there were no Western chroniclers in Outremer between 1127 and 1144. Thus there are no written records for those crucial years.

We do not, in short, know much of Guillaume’s sources, and this may well call some of his statements into question. He may have been drawing on popular word of mouth, on a none too reliable oral tradition.

Alternatively, he may have consulted the Templars themselves and recounted what they told him. If this is so, it means he is reporting only what the

Templars wanted him to report.

Granted, Guillaume does provide us with certain basic information; and it is this information on which all subsequent accounts of the Templars, all explanations of their foundation, all narratives of their activities have been based. But because of Guillaume’s vagueness and sketchiness, because of the time at which he was writing, because of the death of documented sources, he constitutes a precarious basis on which to build a definitive picture. Guillaume’s chronicles are certainly useful. But it is a mistake and one to which many historians have succumbed to regard them as unimpugnable and wholly accurate.

Even Guillaume’s dates, as Sir Steven

Runciman stresses, ‘are confused and at times demonstrably wrong’.”

According to Guillaume de Tyre, the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1118. Its founder is said to be one

Hugues de Payen, a nobleman from Champagne and vassal of the count of Champagne.” One day Hugues, unsolicited, presented himself with eight comrades at the palace of Baudouin I -king of Jerusalem, whose elder brother, Godfroi de Bouillon, had captured the Holy City nineteen years before. Baudouin seems to have received them most cordially, as did the