Read The Seal Online

Authors: Adriana Koulias

Tags: #General, #Fiction

The Seal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ADRIANA KOULIAS was born in Brazil and
migrated to Australia with her family when she was nine years old. She has a
passion for Philosophy, History and Esoteric Science, and lectures internationally
on these topics.

Also by Adriana Koulias:

Temple of the Grail

The Sixth Key

Fifth Gospel
– A Novel

 

 

THE
SEAL

ADRIANA KOULIAS

 

 
 

First edition 2006,
Second edition 2007, Third Edition (ebook 2008) in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia.

Fourth Edition published by Zuriel Press 2012.

Copyright © Adriana Koulias 2006.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including
photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the Zuriel Press.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Koulias, Adriana. The seal.

ISBN 978-0-9874620-1-5 

Contents

About the
Author

Title Page

Contents

Dedication

Quotes

List of Characters

Author's_Note

 

THE FIRST DAY

A Question

 

The First Card

1 The Fall of Acre

2 The
Prophecy

3
Leper's Confidant

4
Departure

5
Etiene and Iterius

6 The
Old Church

7 Salamis

 

The Second Card

8 France

9 The
Young Master

10 Poitiers

11 The Pope and the Grandmaster

12 The
Keeper

13
The Mercenaries

14 The Gold

15 The
Fair King

16
One Man's Funeral is Another Man's Lure

 

FIRST
NIGHT SECOND DAY

Pause

 

17 The Arrest

18
Light
in Dakness, Word in Silence

19
Credo

20 The Notary

 

The Third Card

21 Judas or Peter

22
Shroud

23
Chapter
at Tomar

25 Bodies

26 The English Galley

27
Madness

28 Devils and Angels

30 Clement V

31 The Pope and
Charles of Valois

32 The Herbalist

33 The Treasurer

 

The Fourth Card

35 The Woman

36
Tryst

37 The Lawyer

38 The King and his
Counsellor

39 Confessions

 

SECOND
NIGHT, THIRD DAY

Remembering

 

The Fifth Card

40 Wolf

41 The Slaying of the
Wolf

42 Pierre de Bologna

43 The Bishop of
Paris

 

The Sixth Card

44 The Burning

45
Atonement

46 Jaques de Molay

47 Nine Templars

48 The Suppression

49 Know Thyself

50
Conspiracy

51 Midnight Oil for
Burning

52
Conspiracy

53 Castle on the
Mountain

54 De Nogaret's
Mistress

55 New
Covenant

56 Via Crucis

57 The Island of the
Jews

58
Hell

59 Snakes and Snares

60 The Stag

61 Round Room

62 Jourdain

63 Voices

 

The Seventh
Card

64 The Seal

65 The Answer

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

 

I dedicate this book to the great teachers Zarathustra, Manes,
Buddha, Scythianos, Christian Rosencreutz, Rudolf Steiner, and all those who
have shown humanity how to look at the world with the eyes of the spirit. And
to Etienne, wherever he may be now, for his inspiration.

 

 

Anyone who views life other than as an
illusion that consumes itself is still entangled in life. Life should not be a
novel given to us, but one written by us.

Novalis

In order for the word of the spirit to penetrate the flesh of man,
man must first be shaken to his depths by the great upheavals of history,
then
eternal truth bursts forth like a stream of light.

Eduard Shuré

List of Characters

Alphonse: Templar
scribe

Andrew of
Scotland: Templar knight

Aubert: Norman
mercenary

Ayme d’Oselier: Marshal
of the Order

Bartholomew: Commander
of Tomar

Charles of Valois:
Count of Romagne, Emperor Pretender to Constantinople and brother of Philip of
France

Delgado: Catalan
mercenary

Enguerrand de
Marigny: Royal Chamberlain, Co-adjutor and Rector of the Kingdom of France

Etienne de
Congost: Seneschal of the Templar Order and deputy to Jacques de Molay

Geoffrey de
Charney: Preceptor of Normandy

Gideon: Norman
mercenary

Gilles Aicelin: Archbishop
of Narbonne

Guillaume de
Baufet: Bishop of Paris, Julian’s guardian

Guillaume de
Nogaret: Royal lawyer, Secretary General and Keeper of the Royal Seals of the
Kingdom of France

Guillaume de
Plaisians: Counsellor and lawyer for the French Crown, de Nogaret’s aide and
protégé

Hugues de Pairaud
Visitor of the Order in France, head of the Temple bank

Iterius: Egyptian
sergeant of the Order; astrologer to the King of France

Author’s Note

The wind comes
from the mountains today. It whistles and moans over the bay and enters the
house of the heart, and sings. It echoes the inevitable, the irreversible.

It speaks of
secrets.

There are always
secrets . . . locked in the resin of forgotten and distorted things, buried in
the silt of a thousand years, encrusted, lifeless in the substratum. These are
the secrets of the mountain, of the dreamless sleep of the will of nature. But
the secrets of the will of men lie hidden beneath the veil of Isis and they are
created in the form of surfaces, each more revealing than a fossil, more
brilliant than a diamond. To lift the veil, however, is to know both Paradise
and the Abyss, the child in the throat of a God and in the Beast.

Once you stretch
forth your hand, once you trace the signs in the air, all things are set into
motion and there is no turning back.

 

 

THE FIRST DAY

A QUESTION
Therein lies a
tale which
I must
needs tell thee.
The Völsunga Saga, chapter XIII
Lockenhaus, July 2006

The old woman
said that clouds were moving in from the north bringing rain to dust the pollen
from the lime trees. Until then it would remain hot.

Her shop door
was open, from inside the smell of dust, mothballs, ashes and memories ventured
out to mingle with the breeze-borne scent of sunburnt flowers and warm grass.

She was now very
old and given to sitting in the shade of the portal outside her shop to watch,
with an indolent eye, the parade of tourists as they walked the flinted path to
the castle. Now and again one would pause to gaze at the little paper¬weights
in the shape of suits of armour with helmets that stapled paper, while another
would handle the time-dulled key rings, fridge magnets, assorted crosses,
little crystal cups and grail-like pewter mugs emblazoned with the red cross.

Day after day
they came and went, a never-ceasing number, preoccupied with their ritual of
inspection, herding past the maps, stencilled wooden boxes, baskets and
tablecloths, buying

this
and that, flicking through
ancient postcards and age-worn books piled up like obelisks on the floor.

‘Beauseant! ’
she
would yell at them when she felt like it, and then she
would raise her head with an arm extended to mimic a gravity-laden archangel.
The tourists would pause and smile, thinking her a sideshow for their
amusement.

Sometimes when
she had their attention, she would tell the story of the Templars of
Lockenhaus, the castle beyond her little shop. She would tell them of Philip
the Fair and Pope Clement V who together brought down the most valiant Order in
the known world. When she spoke thus she seemed to mislay her ritual of patient
disillusionment, her eyes would lose themselves in the distance of things and
she would smile with a knowing, no longer an old woman.

No one guessed,
however, that she was the keeper of secrets.

Not the
government officials who ran the castle, not the caretakers, not even the
residents of the little village, with its polite square bordered by flowers
where stood the steep church and the school. How could anyone have known that
this frail old woman kept the memory of this place stored up and sealed in her
heart like a box full of wonders? That she knew the meaning of the strange
symbols carved into the walls of the castle? That she knew the exact location
of the escape hatch in the well, or the history of the blood hall where the last
battle between the great knights of the Temple and its foes took place?

This woman knew
the accurate chronology of the families that had owned the great ‘Bourg’, and
what lay behind the symbolic devices on each shield that hung in the round room
of stone. She knew and so she smiled when tourists, scholars and professors,
doctors of this or that, came to Lockenhaus with their varied opinions.

No one asked
her, and she in turn told no one. You see
,
she was
waiting for me.

I met her on a
Friday in late July. I had been staying at the hotel adjoining the castle and
was paused browsing in her shop for a postcard to send to my family. This day
she was not sitting outside her shop but stood staring at me from behind the
counter. She wore a blue dress slightly torn at the collar and an intense
taciturn expression.

‘Are you a
musician?’ she asked. ‘Come to play at the concerts?’

I told her that
I was writing a book about the knights Templar and that the castle interested
me.

This didn’t seem
to impress her. ‘The knights interest everyone. I suppose you are writing
nonsense. That is all that is ever written about them these days.’

I told her that
I hoped to write the truth.

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