The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (3 page)

Prince von
Metternich, the leader of the reaction against the upsets caused by Napoleon all over Europe, had started a cultural policy intended to destroy the credibility of the contemporary Freemason and neo-Templar groups. The intention was to prove that those heroic brethren of a secret order from which the French and the Revolution were proud to be derived, were in fact nothing but a bunch of heretics and perverts, the enemies of God, of the Church, of the State.

From champions of free thought and guardians of sublime knowledge as they had been in France and England, the Templars became in Austria the stronghold of the most unyielding heresy. Napoleon probably was aware of this political exploitation of the legend, and if he was, that must have increased his interest.
[6]

About the
Baphomet, and other demons

In the same year as the French Emperor was to write his review of François
Raynouard’s none too brilliant tragedy on the Templars, the London publishers Bulmer & Cleveland published a book by Joseph Hammer (later Joseph von
Hammer-Purgstall), called
Ancient alphabets and Hieroglyphic characters explained
, with an account of the Egyptian priests. The author was a young Austrian scholar from the town of Graz in Steyermark, who had joined the diplomatic service in 1796 and three years later had become a member of an embassy to
Constantinople. He was later to take part in several British expeditions against Napoleon in the Middle East, meanwhile studying the ancient civilizations and travelling widely. This intense research, and the remarkable openness of his mind, would lead him to become over the next 50 years one of the greatest oriental scholars of his time, author among other things of a textbook on the history of the Ottoman Empire which is recognised as the first significant treatment of a previously unexplored field. In 1847-1849 he was to crown his career by becoming chairman of the immensely prestigious Austrian Academy of Sciences, which was to count among its members such figures as
Christian Doppler and
Konrad
Lorenz.
[7]
What he had printed in 1806 were his first experiences of research; and, possibly to support the wishes of his mighty patron
Metternich, and surely under the influence of the “black legend” of the Templars in his time, he placed in this review of ancient scripts a hypothesis born from mere similarity in sound, which would however rouse great shock and interest.
Hammer-Purgstall had in fact identified a word written in hieroglyphics, which in his reading sounded like
Bahúmíd
, and which, if translated into Arabic, meant “calf”.

Today we can reconstruct his work’s development, and these scholar’s oddities acquire a logical explanation. We do in fact find that some witnesses, not members of the Order, who testified in the
trial of the Templars in England, had mentioned strange rumours according to which the Templars kept an
idol in the shape of a calf. Furthermore, some testimonies in the
trial carried out in southern France featured that strange name,
Baphomet, which made such an impression on
Hammer-Purgstall, because it seemed to approximate his mysterious word. These few witnesses of obscure notions are at most ten or so, and are really a droplet in the over one thousand testimonies (affidavits) still preserved today from the Templar
trials, in most of which neither fiends nor calves appear. But the 19th century scholar, drawn by the romantic taste of his time and by a really quite unscientific research method, fell victim in good faith to the magnetic fascination of an idea: he paid no attention to proportion, only saw the tiny amount of descriptions with their disquieting details, and forgot a whole world of much more reliable and rational confessions. And, to the pleasure of Prince von
Metternich, he designed for the Templars an exoteric and decidedly grim aspect.
[8]

The pieces of the mosaic struck him as fitting each other perfectly, and the pull of the idea drove him further into his investigations. But it was only in 1818, after Waterloo and Napoleon’s exile in St. Helena, after the
Congress of Vienna and the dawn of Restauration, that
Hammer-Purgstall’s theories started taking a mature shape; and they did so by heftily drawing from other sources. In that year he published the work fated to achieve the highest fame in this area, whose eloquent title was
Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum – The Mystery of
Baphomet; Revealed
. The author gave up his former belief that the Templar
idol’s strange name came from an ancient hieroglyphic term, and embraced a more complex theory: the word was no longer from the Egyptian language, but was a compound of two Greek terms joined to mean a “baptism of the spirit”. He claimed that it proved that the Templars had inherited from antiquity, through the
Cathar heretics of south France, the doctrines of the ancient
Ophite sect. The latter took their name from the special cult they offered to the snake (Greek Ophis) from the Biblical book of Genesis. To them, the God of the Bible was not the principle of good but of evil, who out of petty jealousy had kept man in a condition of ignorance; and it had been the snake who was not the enemy, but the friend of humankind, to reveal the path of truth, that is, to
gnosis
(Greek for “knowledge”), divine knowledge.
[9]

This was the primeval religion, the most ancient one known; it always survived in the shadows with its secrets, escaping down the millennia the persecutions of the Church and of the various powers that relied on it. One of the worst charges the King of France had thrown against the Templars was that they forced their novices to deny
Jesus and spit on the Cross; this could be matched with an information from Origen (who had lived in the early 3rd century AD) that the Ophites forced their new members to blaspheme Jesus.

Shortly after the publication of
Hammer-Purgstall’s theories, it happened that the Duke of Blacas, a famous collector of exoteric-type objects, found as if by magic two extremely strange little caskets supposedly dated to the Middle Ages and representing some sort of devil-cult. The
Baphomet received at that point the public consecration and the henceforth famous shape that none of the Templar sources, rare and mutually contradictory as they were, ever could grant. It was depicted as a kind of devil with the horns and legs of a ram, the breasts of a woman and the genitals of a man.
[10]
The brilliant and dishonest occultist Eliphas
Levi rediscovered these fascinating fakes in the late 1800s, finding material in them that was most useful to his speculations; and he dressed the ill-defined
Baphomet in that threatening devilish majesty in which he towers to this day in so many fantasy pictures. Fans of the occult are free to believe what they wish, but historical evidence leaves no reasonable doubt but that
Baphomet is nothing but an ugly doll invented – neither more nor less – by romantic fantasy, and still in use to this day to profitably catch the simple.
[11]

The truth about the “Mysterious
idol of the Templars” must be sought in a wholly different direction.

Paper secrets

Although his writings sounded like genuine revelations at the time,
Hammer-Purgstall had invented very little, and the bulk of his content was anything but of his own making. The idea that the Templars were the secret guardians of a most ancient religious wisdom had already been proposed some 20 years earlier, in a less extensive form, by the German book dealer Christian Friedrich
Nicolai. Nicolai owned a tavern in Berlin that was a favourite meeting place for intellectuals. Among them, a personal friend of
Nicolai’s called Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing, possibly the most outstanding personality in German Enlightenment.
[12]

In 1778,
Lessing had written a genuinely explosive book. It was a part of a much larger text written years earlier by Samuel
Reimarus, professor of Oriental languages, and bore the provocative title:
An Apology for the Rational Worshippers of God
. Its original author had kept it secret; now
Lessing published it posthumously with the more reassuring title:
The Goals of Jesus and His Disciples – another fragment from the Anonymous of Wolfenbüttel
.
Reimarus argued that Jesus had nothing divine about him; his activity would have been simply that of a political Messiah, a kind of patriot leader who wanted to free the Jews from Roman rule. When he died, his disciples refused to accept the facts and decided to steal the body, and went on to invent the news that he had risen, eventually founding a new religion. Samuel
Reimarus was the first member of Western Christian culture to separate Jesus from the Christ, terms that had for so many centuries meant one and the same thing. That moment marks the start of the “quest for the historical Jesus”, a new direction in research, intended to reconstruct the historical visage of Jesus beyond what was held to have been invented by the Catholic Church with its dogmas; while before then there had only been a Christology, that is the study of the life of Jesus in the light of theology and the Gospels.
[13]
Both
Lessing and
Nicolai inclined to what used to be called “
rational Christianity”, something very close to
Deist philosophy, which substantially denied the divinity of the Christ to assert the existence of a single and sole creator God, the rational principle of absolute goodness and the origin of all things. Some radical circles reached the conviction that Church and Papacy had stubbornly and dishonestly hidden a frightening truth for no better reason than to ennoble their historically dubious origins, placing them within God himself. And the strongly reactionary attitude of some Catholic areas, clinging to total denial, strengthened their opponents’ belief that they had something to hide.

By 1810, Napoleon had become the master of most of Europe, and he decreed that all the documents of conquered kingdoms, including the States of the Church, were to be taken to Paris to become part of the vast Central Archive of the Empire. So it was that the colossal bulk of papers accumulated by the Popes were packaged up and set into motion towards France. Thanks to the esoteric tradition that had been growing, the arrival of the documents concerned with the
trial of the Templars was surrounded by great expectations and even by a morbid kind of curiosity: those papers, kept safe for so long within the mighty walls of the Vatican, would certainly have revealed disconcerting facts. It was widely and largely correctly believed that the papal archive had always been
Secretum
, that is reserved to the Roman curia, and that no outsider would ever have been allowed a view of them. A kind of frenzy arose among the French officials charged with the expedition; it seemed clear that the truth about that obscure and complicated affair would have appeared, whole and inviolate, to the first man who could lay his hands on the minutes of the
trial. Monsignor Marino
Marini, personal manservant of the prefect of the Vatican Archives, had plenty of trouble with certain generals who insisted on opening particular crates of documents even before the convoy left Rome; and while the pragmatic Miollis was looking for the Bull of Excommunication against Napoleon, intending to quietly get rid of a most uncomfortable fact, Baron Étienne
Radet was poking around elsewhere, eager to lay his hands on the
trial of the Templars.

Even after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy, when the papal archive was allowed to return home, Monsignor
Marini was still fighting to prevent the new government from “carelessly” keeping a number of documents of the highest historical interest, including the Inquisition’s trial of
Galileo Galilei and the
trial of the Templar Order. He only got them back by a crafty suggestion: he saw fit to point out to the new government that the actions of
Philip the Fair threw a decidedly nasty light on that very image of French monarchy that they intended to rehabilitate. It was therefore rather better, ultimately, that they should go back to the Vatican Archives, which were then closed to the public.
[14]

The Duc de
Richelieu felt it wiser to yield to the Holy See’s complaints, as well as to Monsignor
Marini’s witty arguments; but he looked surely on with great regret as the documents of the Templar
trial, which
Raynouard had meanwhile studied without finding the hidden truths, left Paris to return at last to the safe recesses of the Vatican, where the mysteries of
Baphomet and many other demons would have been hidden away for heaven knew how many more centuries. And yet what really happened was that on 10 December 1879, the brand new register of requests to consult the Vatican Secret Archive recorded its first request. Over the course of the centuries, many people had been given special permission to visit the great palace where the documents of the Popes’ thousands of years of history were kept; but only then were scholars first allowed regular and continuous access to the precious papers.
[15]
From the middle of the 19th century, historical studies had made a quantum leap, because the general trend of thought, thanks in part to the rising tide of
Positivism, had lost the taste for irrationalism that had fascinated early
Romanticism, in favour of a much more realistic approach.
Palaeography and diplomatics – the disciplines that teach to decipher the complex writings of the past and to reliably distinguish genuine from false documents – had been taking giant strides. This was the start of a brilliant cultural period, which witnessed the systematic publication of many mediaeval sources, no longer by private and sometimes amateurish learned gentlemen, but by professional historians who produced systematic collections valid to this day, such as for instance the German-area
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
, which among other things, contains many edicts of
Charlemagne and an enormous number of immensely important texts from the Holy Roman Empire.

Between 1841 and 1851, the French historian Jules
Michelet published, in an equally authoritative and prestigious series –
Collection des Documents inédits sur l’Histoire de France
– the contents of an ancient register from the reign of
Philip the Fair, which was then preserved in the Royal Library of Paris, and some other similar documents; it was an excellent edition for its time, which finally gave a scholarly picture of some of the most important documents of the
trial against the Templars. The
Michelet edition is still in use, although it is not widely known that its main item, the minutes of the long
trial that took place in Paris between 1309 and 1312, comes from a copy that the King had made for his own Chancellery, while the original, which had been sent to the Pope, is in the Vatican Archives and still unpublished. The documents show no trace of
Baphomet, of the magic
Gnostic caskets, and of the other dark mysteries that people connected with the Templars; nor would a character like
Michelet’s, or the earnest spirit of the historical collection, have allowed such fantasies. Even popular contemporary culture had noticeably matured, so that themes that had been so fashionable 20 years earlier may no longer have interested people; and it was exactly thanks to that improvement in historical method that Pope
Leo had made the anything but easy decision to open the gates of the Secret Archives.