The Templars obsessively built churches dedicated to John the Baptist. Tomar.
The Knights Templar in Portugal may very well have continued the initiatory practice of ‘raising the dead’. During interrogation by the Inquisition, a Templar knight cryptically stated: “There exists in the Order a law so extraordinary on which such a secret should be kept, that any knight would prefer his head cut off rather than reveal it.”
This statement has caused a flurry of speculation as to what secret the Templars were privy to. Were they simply following a rediscovered secret doctrine of initiation or was there something else?
One well-studied route revolves around the protection of a holy bloodline, championed very convincingly by the authors of Holy Blood Holy Grail. During my own research to discover why the Templars created Portugal for their main center of activity — an subject barely touched by Templar historians until I wrote First Templar Nation — it seemed to me that they wanted to be as far from Rome as possible — this secret required protection from papal interference, and the Portuguese were tolerant of such a policy because traditionally followed a policy of paying lip service to papal authority.
If you recall, the Templars, to all intents and purposes, were an extension of the Cistercian Order and its abbot Bernard de Clairvaux, a number of its key knights being Cistercian monks. A goodly number were also high ranking members of the Order of Sion, particularly its prior, Pedro Arnaldo. One of the declared aims of the Order of Sion was the reinstatement of a holy bloodline upon the throne of Jerusalem, if not the throne of a European state. This bloodline descended from the House of Troy, through the line of David, and into the Merovingian dynasty of medieval Europe. The Order of Sion accomplished the first objective when it seated the Merovingian Godefroi de Bouillon upon the throne of Jerusalem following the conquest of the city.
Such a holy bloodline was considered a great treasure, and given the brief longevity of kings of Jerusalem in this era, it is possible the Order of Sion planned to elect another Merovingian, this time in the relatively safe territory of Portugal — someone who could be groomed and protected by the Templars and their successors. Perhaps. There is a surviving document held in the Cistercian archives which outlines the rites of succession of Templar Masters in Portugal, in which the swearing of allegiance by every new Master unambiguously declares a vow “to protect the bloodline of David.” Such a blatant line item would hardly be featured unless there was a bloodline to protect.
But the other aspect of the Templar secret and the creation of Portugal lies in their association with the Grail, or Graal.
Although perceived as many things, ultimately the Graal describes the journey of a hero who undertakes a perilous journey into a mystical land and returns transfigured by the experience and the knowledge he’s exposed to, whereupon he has a spiritual awakening. So to anyone who understands the Mysteries, the Grail is not an object but the search for the highest spiritual potential within oneself. In the religious climate of medieval Europe nothing could be more dangerous. The Templars reversed the tide of ignorance perpetuated by the Church by offering anyone the chance to experience this living resurrection, to which end they built countless secret chambers, much like their predecessors from Egypt to ancient Japan, and this is perhaps the single-most reason why both rich and lay people donated all their worldly goods to help the order succeed.
Inside the charola.
It must be stressed that the living resurrection has historically been performed in secret chambers and ancient sacred sites. Science now knows that such ancient temples are found at the intersection of the Earth’s electromagnetic pathways. This concentrated energy is known to stimulate areas of the brain that lead to altered states. Such a spiritual technology is a pre-requisite for inducing the voluntary near-death experience that sends the candidate on a shamanic, out-of-body journey. It was the key ingredient in living resurrection ceremonies. And virtually every site won by the Templars was an ancient sacred site, typically dedicated to Isis or her regional doppelganger.
As a Templar knight, king Afonso Henriques would have been privy to the Templars’ spiritual teachings and the attainment of this inner transformation, the Graal, and it merited awarding the order one third of his land, to establish a kingdom within a kingdom. On the king’s charter lies the unusual cross symbol with the anagram PORTUG-R-AL. In Portuguese it reads ‘through you, the Graal.’ Afonso is alluding that the Graal is to be found in this territory, specifically the town of Tomar, particularly when one considers the name is also a metaphor. In Portuguese it means ‘to drink, to imbibe’, and in esoteric circles, an initiate of the Mysteries must ‘drink’ the knowledge if it is to be internalized. The successful candidate would complete the final initiation by undertaking a voluntary near-death experience, to be awoken by an adept in the morning and lifted from a figurative grave. At this moment they were declared ‘risen’. This initiation is still performed today by the Templars’ progeny, the Scottish Rite Freemasons.
The Templars left clues that the crypt under the enigmatic rotunda of Tomar was used for such a purpose. If you trace a line through the rotunda to the Templar church of John the Baptist, the line passes through two pillars with the pagan symbols of the dragon and the green man, symbols of rejuvenation, and ends 2000 miles away in the church of Notre Dame du Mont Sion in Jerusalem. If you then take that church plus the other two prime Templar sites — the Holy Sepulchre and Solomon’s stables (where they resided) — this perfect triangle is bisected and the imaginary line ends in Egypt, specifically in the underground chamber called the Osirion, where the oldest resurrection ritual of Osiris was once celebrated.
We are presented here with the intriguing possibility that the Templars placed the Graal in Tomar. All these centuries, while we’ve focused on their exploits in Jerusalem and France (and to some degree in Britain), like the smokescreen myth of nine knights protecting a pilgrim trail, the stories have distracted our gaze away from the main accomplishments taking place in this remote country they created before the order itself was made official.
It is indeed an incredible coincidence that just as the Templars are erecting their mysterious rotunda in Tomar, the Graal writer Cretien de Troyes begins writing his famous opus. In the story, the Graal rests on a salver, a ceremonial silver tray. One has to wonder, then, why the Templars called this round building a charola. Because it literally translates as ‘a salver’ — a most unusual name for a religious building that stands at the crossroads of two electromagnetic lines, and never had an altar or a door.
The Templars, it seems, gave us the answer on a silver tray.
This article is based on Freddy Silva’s book First Templar Nation
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