MASONIC TEMPLARY: MODERN GUARDIANS OF THE AUTHENTIC GRAIL TRADITION

Sir Knight P.D. Newman

New Albany Commandery, No. 29

  
    Ever since the early to mid 13^th century, when German knight Wolfram von Eschenbach identified them as such in his epic poem Parzival, the legendary Knights Templar have been closely associated with the mythical Knights of the Holy Grail. While no hard historical evidence has ever been produced establishing a direct connection between these two chivalric orders, in the paragraphs which follow will be demonstrated the notion that the influence of Von Eschenbach’s association may have played heavily into the development of the Templar knighting ceremony as it is practiced to this day by the Commandery of the York Rite of Freemasonry. It is on this account that the author has come to view Masonic Templary as something of a modern guardian of the authentic Grail tradition. Given the sensitive nature of the subject matter at hand, it has been necessary that the author take certain precautionary measures so as to avoid any violation of his Obligation as a Knight Templar. Such being the case, any apparent interruption in the continuity of the paper should be taken a direct reflection of the difficulty in the author’s task of conveying his platform under the stated necessary precautions.

   That being said, let us take a moment to briefly touch upon some of what it is that the Grail tradition actually entails. It will also be helpful to examine a couple of the primary literary precursors which some scholars believe may have contributed to the rich lore surrounding the Grail tradition. The Holy Grail is most commonly depicted as being the cup from which Jesus Christ drank during his ‘Last Supper’ prior to being crucified.[1] According to legend, this cup was later used by Joseph of Arimathea, the secret disciple of Christ who donated the tomb wherein Jesus was to be laid following his crucifixion, to collect the mixture of blood and water which flowed from the laceration in Jesus’ side made by the lance or spear of Roman soldier Longinus. Being thus sanctified, the cup was then said to have been imbued with miraculous virtues such as curative powers and the ability to make barren land fertile, and it was for the purpose of preserving this sacred vessel that the Order of the Knights of the Holy Grail was originally founded.

   As a literary precursor to this tale, several scholars have sought to identify the legend of the Holy Grail with the Welsh legend of King Bran, the mythical king of Britain, and his magical cauldron -- the latter of which was said, similar to the qualities attributed to the Holy Grail, to be able to mysteriously restore the dead to life. Magical characteristics such as these were not limited to King Bran’s cauldron, but were also attributed to Bran himself. According to The Mabinogion, an ancient book of Welsh folklore, after realizing his impending fate, the king ordered that his head be severed and returned to Britain where miraculously it continued to speak and, in some cases, even prophecy. After some eighty years, the head ceased speaking, at which time it was taken to a place called ‘White Hill’ and buried facing the direction of France in order to protect the British from French invasion. The legend even goes on to declare that it was none other than King Arthur, the same who features prominently in the Grail tradition, who recovered the skull from its place of rest.[2] In more recent times, certain scholars have sought to align the Holy Grail with the golden platter on which the severed head of St. John the Baptist was served to the dancing Salome by the remorseful King Herod. The reader is asked to note that in both cases the object identified as a forerunner of the Holy Grail is directly associated with the motif of a severed head.

   The Knights Templar were formed in the 12^th century for the noble purpose of escorting Christians on their pilgrimages throughout the Holy Land during the Crusades. After inventing a system which is widely recognized as the forerunner of modern banking, the Templars grew exceedingly wealthy to the point that the powers that be, i.e., the crown and the tiara, sought to relieve them of their riches, and in 1307 a statement was issued by the debt-ridden King Philip IV of France declaring the Templars to be heretics. A great many of them were subsequently arrested, interrogated, tortured, and executed -- their wealth then claimed by the greedy Philip. While no ‘holy cup’ was reported to have ever been discovered amongst the Templars’ treasures, the most widespread of the confessions made by the knights during their interrogation was the collective veneration of a mysterious severed head, reportedly called Baphomet, which was used by them during their ceremonies of initiation.

   According to Von Hammer, the word Baphomet is a combination of the two Greek words Baphe and Metis which, when combined, translates to the baptism of wisdom -- but as we shall see, the use of the word ‘baptism’ here may have less to do with the physical act of submerging the body in, and raising it up out of water, and more to do with the imbibing of a certain libation from a sacred ‘cup.’ Such is the case in The Corpus Hermeticum, a collection of writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the famed author of the Tabula Smaragdina or Emerald Tablet, wherein we read the following:

“Reason indeed[...]among all men hath [Deity] distributed, but Mind not yet; not that He grudgeth any, for grudging cometh not from Him, but hath its place below, within the souls of men who have no Mind[...]He willed, my son, to have it set up in the midst for souls, just as it were a prize[...]He filled a mighty Cup with it, and sent it down, joining a Herald [to it], to whom He gave command to make this proclamation to the hearts of men: Baptize thyself with this Cup's baptism[3], what heart can do so, thou that hast faith thou canst ascend to him that hath sent down the Cup, thou that dost know for what thou didst come into being!” (The Cup or Monad, vv. 3 & 4).

Thus we see that that the term ‘baptism’ can be a reference to the well-known ritual of bodily submersion in water and, more obscurely, a sacred cup or libation. Baphomet therefore, the severed head allegedly venerated by the Templars, may be at once a cryptic reference both to a baptism of wisdom as well as a cup of mind. Interestingly, Von Eschenbach specifically refers to the Knights of the Holy Grail as “baptized men.”

   As demonstrated above, the lore surrounding the Grail tradition is intimately connected with legends involving severed heads. These two seemingly separate themes, a sacred cup and a severed head, would appear somewhat irreconcilable if it was not for the historical precedent provided by the potentially shocking rituals once observed by the Goths of Scandinavia who, according to the research of English Freemason Rev. George Oliver, were prone to drink alcoholic libations from the cap of a human skull, thus uniting neatly the theme of the sacred cup or libation with that of the skull or severed head. Paraphrasing from Oliver’s 1840 work The History of Initiation, Gen. Albert Pike, 33° says that the initiatory rituals of this Eastern Germanic tribe included

“[a] long probation, of fasting and mortification, circular processions, [and] many fearful tests and trials…[The candidate] was obligated upon a naked sword (as is still the custom in the Rit Moderne[4]), and sealed his obligation by drinking mead out of a human skull.[5]”

Turning our attention to the Far East, we find that the ritual motif of drinking from a human skull plays a central role also in the ceremonial observances of the reclusive Shiva worshipping Aghora of India, as well as the remote Vajrayana Buddhists of Tibet, both of whom preserve the curious rite of imbibing libations from a sacred kapala or skullcup. These kapalas are often employed by the practitioners of Vajrayana Buddhism for the additional purpose of making religious offerings to the deific Dharmapalas, who themselves are frequently depicted as bearing these strange yet fascinating relics. The word Dharmapala literally translated means Defender of the Faith, which itself is a phrase that should be particularly meaningful to every Masonic Templar.

   Sir Knight Frederick Shade, in his The Quest for the Holy Grail and the Modern Knights Templar[6], provides an outline of several other similarities between what he calls the Templar hallows and the lesser hallows of the Grail tradition. The lesser hallows of the Grail tradition are described as being certain sacred relics for which the Grail Knights are searching in addition to the Holy Grail. The similarities between the so-called Templar hallows and the lesser hallows of the Grail tradition include, among other things “[t]he dish of bread, which is the food given to the pilgrim on his arrival” and “[t]he skull of mortality, with which the novice undertakes a year of penance, and with which the imprecations are made.” Sir Knight Shade goes on to say that

 “[t]here are several other hallows and sacred signs in the Templar tradition. Some of the lesser hallows of the Grail cycle are suggested here, such as the Templar crucifix, with the nails prominently displayed thereon. There is the knight’s sword, which is to be wielded in defense of the faith and also his shield, all which are beautifully explained in the quotation from St. Paul. They may not necessarily come directly from the Grail legend, but they certainly evoke many aspects of that tradition and resonate as hallows in their own right.”

   Thus we see that Von Eschenbach’s association of the Knights Templar with the mythical Knights of the Holy Grail may very well have had more than a minor influence on the development of the Templar knighting ceremony as it is currently practiced by the Commandery of the York Rite of Freemasonry. Because of the probability of said influence, it is the author’s opinion that Masonic Templary can rightly be called a modern guardian of the authentic Grail tradition, furnished with all that such entails. This is true even for the Candidate who sits silently contemplating in the grim Chamber of Reflections at the commencement of the Templar ceremony, where the human skull present there still has the potential to exhibit that miraculous power of prophetic speech attributed to the severed head of the mythical King Bran. Surrounded oftentimes with oracular messages such as I was what you are and, more importantly, I am what you will be[7], does not the skull in the Chamber of Reflection speak something of our fate to us all?  Is not the bitter cup of death that from which every man must sooner or later partake?

REFERENCES

Barber, Malcom. The Trial of the Templars

Barrett, Ron. Aghora Medicine: Pollution, Death, and Healing in Northern India

Bernard, Elizabeth A. Chinnamasta: The Aweful Buddhist and Hindu Tantric Goddess

Burkle, William S. Memento Mori – The Symbol of the Skull with Crossed Bones

De Costa, Helio L. The Chamber of Reflection

De Hoyos, Arturo. Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma: Annotated Edition

De Troyes, Chretien. Perceval, the Story of the Grail

Goering, Joseph. The Virgin and the Grail

http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/grandlodge.html

Loomis, Roger S. The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol

Mackenzie, K.R.H. Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia

Martin, Sean. The Knights Templar: The History and Myths of the Legendary Military Order

Oliver, George. The History of Initiation

Shade, Rev. Frederick. The Quest for the Holy Grail and the Modern Knights Templar

The Corpus Hermeticum

The Holy Bible: Master Mason Edition

The Mabinogion

Von Eschenbach, Wolfram. Parzival

Zeldis, Leon. The Initiation in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite

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[1] Chretien de Troyes, the trouvere who originally authored the poem, gives instead the dish on which Jesus and his disciples shared in the Paschal Feast.

[2] Note that the name Bran literally means raven. Interestingly, the raven is a symbol commonly employed in Alchemical texts as an allusion to the caput mortuum or dead head phase of the Great Work.

[3] Compare to verse 24 of chapter 20 in The Gospel of St. Matthew, where Jesus says reassuringly to his disciples: “Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with…”

[4] “The Rit Moderne is one of the Masonic systems practiced in France.” – De Hoyos

[5] See also Bro. William Steve Burkle’s Memento Mori – the Symbol of the Skull with Crossed Bones: A Perspective on Death and Dying in the Chivalric Orders of the York Rite of Freemasonry.

[6] Knight Templar Magazine, Vol. LVII, Nos. 10-12 (2011) & Vol. LVIII, No. 1 (2012)

 [7] According to R.W.Bro. Leon Zeldis, these phrases are featured alongside the skull in the version of the Chamber of Reflection used in the Entered Apprentice Degree as it is worked by The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite.

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