The Holy Grail As Code
Early on, while doing research for my novel The Templars Two Kings and a Pope,
I was mystified by the recurrent mention of the Holy Grail in documents
referring to the Knights Templar. It didn't make sense; by then I had
defined that the core of the Templars, those who gave direction to the
Order were without doubt Gnostic mystics who gave little importance to
relics or anything in the material world, which they considered an
illusion, something to be dismissed.
In those days of persecution by Church
inquisitors, non-traditional Christians had to hide their practice and
find secret codes to communicate. This could be something as innocuous
as drawing a cross with all four legs the same size, this meant Gnostic
balance, or a star of David which meant the coming together of male and
female in all of us. When you met someone whom you thought might be a
fellow Gnostic, you started with a salutation, "Beauseant". If they knew
what it meant, then you casually drew a cross on the ground with your
sword or a stick. They would probably respond by drawing a Star of David
or a dove. Then you knew you were safe and could talk freely.
So with all of these secret codes, if a chalice stood for something
else, what would it be? It definitely was not the cup that Jesus used in
the last supper. This would mean nothing to those mystics, an actual
cup?
The Symbol For The Heart
When I dug deeper, I found that starting
even earlier, perhaps back to the 5th century, the Heart, that is the
spiritual heart as opposed to the human organ, was symbolized by a
drinking vessel. Catholics are familiar with paintings of The Sacred
Heart of Jesus, so we know that there was veneration for Jesus' Heart.
The Gnostic Gospels refer consistently to the Heart of Christ that will
open in all of us. David Richo in The Sacred Heart of the World makes
the definite connection between the symbol of a cup and the heart of
Jesus.
It's obvious that in the symbol of the cup,
or Holy Grail, the Templars were referring to something that was a
direct connection to the Heart of Jesus. If we take into account how
revolutionary Jesus’ message of love was in relation to the harsh tone
of Judaism, then it stands to reason that it is this singular aspect of
his teachings that identified him as a vessel of love, ergo his Heart.
Elaine Pagels in her Gnostic Gospels tells us that Jesus gave
secret instruction, what became known as Gnosticism, to the select few,
and spoke in parables to the general public. These teachings were banned
by the Church starting in the 5th century, but for those who knew of
them, they would embody the essence of Jesus, his love, his Heart. If we
put all the facts together, and add that Jesus was a Rabbi, a
well-educated man who spoke and wrote in at least Greek and Aramaic, and
he wanted to propagate his teachings, it stands to reason that he must
have committed them to writing.. Then it makes sense that a document
written by Jesus would be what the Templars were hiding as the Holy
Grail; Jesus’ Heart.
So what happened to the "real Holy Grail", a gospel written by
Jesus? That was a line of inquiry I pursued in my novel. I found
evidence that it was a real document, the actual words of Jesus written
by his own hand. The Brotherhood kept it as a treasure for many
centuries, after they found it, very likely in the place and manner
similar to what I describe in my novel.
The Saga of the Templars’ Real Holy Grail
The Templars’ Real Holy Grail has been
sought after, secreted away, possibly destroyed, only to surface again
in the mysterious labyrinth of Christendom intrigue.
The legends point to the existence of a
Holy Grail. Historical evidence defines it as a Gnostic Gospel written
by Jesus. But where has it been all these centuries?
It is unknown to how many of his twelve
disciples Jesus imparted his secret teachings, but what survives today
as the Gnostic Gospels, what was found in a cave in Egypt in 1947 and is
known as the Naj Hammadi library, contain the writings of Mary
Magdalene and Thomas.
But why then wasn’t there a gospel written by Jesus as well? If he
wrote something, wouldn’t there be at least references to such a
document? Among the Gnostic Gospels there is one called the
Gospel of the Savior,
but no one knows who the author is as yet. Whatever the case might be
about that document, wouldn’t a gospel written by Jesus been singled out
and heralded through the centuries? Well, not if it started out as a
secret document by the author himself, giving very specific instructions
that it cannot be disseminated. Jesus meant his secret teachings for
those who were ready, and these were few and far between. To the masses
he spoke in parables, to the minds with limited understanding that could
not conceive of God residing inside them. He knew that should his
teachings be made public, they would be grossly misinterpreted, and
indeed they were. People were burned at the stake in the Middle Ages for
claiming that they had God inside them. If such a document had made its
way to Church officials, in all probability they would have either
destroyed it or hidden it, for the same reason that it was so valuable
to the Brotherhood, the secret Gnostic organization behind the Templars:
it validated Gnosticism as Jesus’ true teachings while doing away with
the Church’s reason for being, the whole notion that one can only reach
God and salvation through its priests, teachings and liturgy.
The Initial Discovery of the Real Holy Grail
The first instance that the real Holy
Grail surfaced was shortly after the founding of the Templar Order in
1119. The nine Gnostic knights who founded the order, almost immediately
started digging around Solomon’s Temple where they were headquartered.
In due course they stopped digging and made their way to Rome where they
exacted huge concessions from the pontiff that guaranteed the viability
of their new order. Historians have speculated as to what it was that
they found that they could use to sway the pope. The Temple of Solomon
had contained the legendary Ark of the Covenant, but the chances that it
was still around after all those centuries would be unlikely, given
that the Temple had been destroyed and rebuilt several times, and even
then, its possession would not have given such a powerful bargaining
position to the Templars. What would have done it, would be a Jesus
Gospel that if made public, would have meant the end of the Church’s
role as intermediary. But did they find it under the Temple? Not likely.
Through the centuries the place had been just too much of a target, not
a good hiding place for anything of value. It’s far more likely that
the nine Gnostic Templars were after something buried near the Temple.
What stood next to the Temple of Solomon in Jesus’ time was the Antonia
Fortress, the Roman’s administrative center that had also housed a jail
where Jesus had been held before being crucified. Several Roman jails
had cells dug into the ground. It is then possible that Jesus’ cell
could have survived. But why would it hold anything so valuable and who
put it there and why?
When studying mystics, it pays to think like one.
In The Templars Two Kings and a Pope,
William and Hughes are also after the Jesus Gospel. They are instructed
to find Jesus' cell where he meditated and prayed for long hours,
because this is the only place left where his essence has been left
relatively undisturbed. They make the journey and imbue themselves with
Jesus’ essence that leads them to where his gospel was hidden. This line
of reasoning would have made perfect sense to a mystic of the time. For
centuries, before embarking on a pilgrimage it was customary to seek
the essence of the saint one wanted to reach through the pilgrimage. I
believe this is what the nine Templars were after; they found Jesus’
cell, and in due course they found where the gospel was hidden. To us
this whole process would seem like magical thinking, but in those days
that’s how things worked, how people thought and acted, and is the
process I applied in the novel given that I was writing about medieval
Templars.
At any rate, by however process and means, it was found.
The Real Holy Grail and the Cathars
After the nine Templars originally found
it, the next time the gospel surfaced was almost a century and a half
later, on March 25, 1244, when the Cathar castle of Montsegur in the
Languedoc region of France fell to the pope’s army. Legend has it that a
handful of Cathars (who were Gnostics) within the Castle took the Holy
Grail with them before the castle fell.
It makes sense that the Templars loaned the Gospel to other
Gnostics. After all, it validated their faith as the true teachings of
Jesus, and it was probably passed around from one group to another.
The Original Real Holy Grail Vs. Copies
The next time we hear about the real
Holy Grail, it’s back in Templar hands, that is their Brotherhood, and
they make it to Scotland with it.
My theory is that these were copies, not
the original. Even before medieval times, copies signed by reputable
scribes were considered just as good as the original. In fact, it was
necessary to make copies to safeguard the original. Anyone with a blade
for scraping and a quill could make changes to a document, but copies
made by reputable scribes was a way to safeguard the integrity of the
text. The original in Jesus’ actual handwriting would have been
treasured in a sacred place, much as the Ark of the Covenant had been
because of its mystical rather than practical value.
In the novel, the gospel has to be a copy,
for it came from the Library of Alexandria. For centuries the scribes at
the library copied every document they came across. The law said that
any ship containing books, or any traveler who came into the city had to
surrender their books for copying. This is how the library became the
foremost depository of knowledge in the Empire. In the article The Holy
Grail’s Hiding Place (below), I describe how and why several copies made
it from Alexandria to the depository called Hafiz Mountain in the
Tibesti Mountains, in present day Chad. The Templars in the novel go
after one of these copies because they know that their time in the Holy
Land is running out as the Turks are about to expel all Christian
armies.
It’s quite conceivable that the copy that
the original Templars found in 1120, the one at Montsegnur in 1244 and
the one the Templars took to Scotland in 1307, were all different
copies; but I doubt it, you couldn’t have anything so potentially
dangerous loose. Someone could alter the writing and make it say
something different, and then the other copies would have to come to the
surface to correct the falsehood, probably resulting in their
destruction. There was probably one copy always guarded by Templars who
had orders to destroy it if necessary.
My thought is that the copy found by the
original nine Templars was the same as the one at Montsegur, and this
one copy was destroyed before it fell into enemy hands. The Brotherhood
decided at this point to leave the remaining copies where they were,
safe in their original hiding place, the Hafiz Mountain in the novel, a
very likely real depository for the Gospel and the other books from the
Library of Alexandria.
It is at Hafiz Mountain that the Templars in the novel find a copy
of the Gospel. This is one of several instances in the book where
fiction approximates what really happened. The rest of the novel, the
impact that the Gospel had on the Brotherhood, what they had to do to
protect it, and how it shaped history, is very real.
The Holy Grail's Hiding Place
The legend of the Holy Grail was born during the romantic era in the
early middle ages; an era that gave birth to the concept of courtly
love, gallantry, and the forbidden love that one was willing to die for.
Many songs and poems were composed at the time by traveling minstrels,
most having to do with beautiful damsels, but some with great adventures
and treasures, such as the Holy Grail. During the middle ages they
thought that it all started with King Arthur and his court, but actually
it was the middle ages that gave birth to the Arthurian myth…yet
another product of the romantic era.
The Hiding of the Holy Grail
However, we are talking about the real
Holy Grail, a document. Where was it hidden all those centuries before
the Templars found it? I concluded that in the same place where the bulk
of the books from the Library of Alexandria were secreted to after
Christian hordes started destroying everything that was not the approved
Bible. According to what the Arabs recorded, monks who had been in
charge of the library took their books to a secret location where they
were translated into Arabic and disseminated throughout the Arab world,
back in 421, two centuries before the Prophet Mohammed, when Emperor
Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.
That’s also the time when the Gnostic Gospels were buried, what was
found in 1947 in a cave in Egypt and became known as the Naj-Hammadi
Library, the finding that revolutionized our knowledge of Jesus’
teachings. Dr. Pagels’s book, The Gnostic Gospels is based on
her study of these documents. Unfortunately there was no gospel written
by Jesus among them, but this was to be expected, since Jesus meant for
readership to be restricted to the very select few.
A thesis in my novel is that the monks at
the Library of Alexandria had the secret Jesus Gospel. The reasoning is
simple; Alexandria was not only the cultural center of the Empire, it
was also its most progressive city, where Jesus learned what became his
Gnosticism, from Buddhists. Buddhism did have an impact in the city
where intellectual inquiry was the norm, where most of the greatest
learned men came. So yes, it makes sense that whoever was in charge of
the library would reflect the city’s culture, and the biggest, most
complete library in all of the Roman Empire, ran by mystical Christian
monks, would certainly have copies of Jesus’ document. Just the fact
that they wanted to save the knowledge in their hands by handing it over
to the Arabs speaks volumes about what they were like.
So where did the Library of Alexandria
monks take their books including the Jesus Gospel? I placed myself in
their place, studying what was known about the world at the time and
what was happening around them. As fanatical Christian hordes started
descending on the library to destroy its contents, the monks had to act
fast. They looked for a safe place that was well away from invaders and
fanatical hordes, and in a direction away from danger. To achieve this,
from Alexandria you would have to look due west, towards what was then
known as the Libyan wilderness, basically the western-most chunk of
Africa that encompasses most of the Sahara. Well, fortunately for them,
and for me, someone else had escaped in that direction centuries before,
with a similar goal in mind, to find a safe haven away from violence,
in this case, an invading army. These were the mystics who left Judea
and Israel during the Assyrian invasion in 722 BCE and founded a colony
hidden away in the Tibesti Mountains in what is today’s Chad. For well
over two millennia this was a place known to the mystical underground, a
place where one could find sanctuary away from so-called civilization, a
place to pray and meditate in peace.
Looking at a map of that time, the Tibesti
Mountains made perfect sense. In fact, it would have been hard to pass
up. It is hard to get to, one has to cross many miles of desert, but
once in the mountains there are valleys with 20 inches of rain a year,
plenty to support a colony. No other location offered relative
proximity, safe passage, habitability, and the promise of a peaceful
life.
I figured that the place had a name, a code
name that would not give away its location. In the novel I called it
Hafiz Mountain, because Hafiz in Arabic means to preserve knowledge, as
in writing, memorizing, or secreting it away, and I figured that’s what
the mystical underground and then the Brotherhood would have called it,
or something very similar.
In the book, the document is found and
taken away to Europe by the Brotherhood. Centuries prior another copy
was very likely found by the nine Templars who founded the Order, only
to be lost. This time it made sense to keep the remaining copies safe
until the last minute, because possession of such a document was so
dangerous. In any case, the Holy Grail made its way to Europe, I believe
in a manner very close to what I describe in The Templars Two Kings and a Pope.
St. Dominic and Dog
Dog at the Station of the Cross, Lincoln Cathedral
Church of Mary Magdalene, Beziers, France
Joseph and Mary with baby Jesus - Lincoln County General Hospital Chapel
seem to have became entwined with the story of the
Christian Holy Grail. 
Cauldrons were used in ceremonial feasting
as early as the Late Bronze Age. Ritual deposits in Llyn Fawr
(Glamorgan,