Off the Road (21 page)

Louis and the others enter a
bar for a drink. Other pilgrims have gathered, and the talk is of Ponferrada,
the Templars, the mystery. On a wall outside, the anarchists have painted a
giant slogan.
Tus pesadillas son mis sueños:
“Your nightmares are my
dreams.” A bookstore across the street has a window display advertising a
collection of books on the Knights Templar. I excuse myself. As I push open the
door, a stick at the top rakes across a set of harmonic chimes, filling the
room with the tranquil melodies of a New Age shop.

The books look so inviting,
dust jackets swirling in creamy brilliant colors, fantastic emblems and
personages, and such promises. The secrets of the Knights Templar. The hidden
truths of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The true story behind the many (recent)
sightings of the Virgin Mary. The revival of paganism. The wanton practices of
witches. An encyclopedia of angels.

The heavenly octave has
summoned from the rear the proprietress. Even in Spain she looks like her
American counterpart, a dirty blonde with fallen shoulders, wraparound print
skirt, tank top, sandals, and headband. She walks past shelves of books and
tables of lava lamps and astronomical maps and glow-in-the-dark rosaries and
jars of crystals and geodes of all sizes. They even sell those eight-balls I
used to buy as a child; shake them up and a message appears. Mine reads “Try
again.” Her face is a tired expression of pinched eyes, expansive crow’s-feet,
and downturned lips, as if she had decoded the mystical universal puzzle, and
the great truth was to buy low and sell high.

She is counting out a
fistful of peseta bills from a cash register, tallying up the day’s take in
esoteric truth. Capitalism and mysticism make very awkward companions. I tell
her I am a pilgrim en route to Santiago and am interested in the latest research
on the castle across the way. She jerks her head toward the dozen books in the
window.

“Ponferrada is filled with
specialists on the castle,” she tells me. She mentions a few names of locals to
whom I might want to talk. Then she opens one book to a page of fat type and
reveals one theory she finds particularly curious.

The Templars had a secret
code to which only the highest twelve members of the order were privy. In the
event of some catastrophe, such as the near annihilation that took place in the
early 1300s, any one of these surviving members could come to Ponferrada and
just by taking in the architecture could “read” the stones and know where the
great mystery was hidden. That code turns on the letter
T,
or Tau, which
signifies the Templars and the cross and is somehow related to the number
twelve, which in turn harkens to all kinds of associations—master Templars,
apostles, months, zodiac signs. Only one Templar establishment had twelve
towers—Ponferrada.

Scholars studying the fort
here have discovered that, just as Louis said, the towers mimic the
constellations in the sky. The problem is, they are not in the proper order
ever to match the stars in the sky. So this author—she points to a page of
outlines of towers and connect-the-dot renditions of the constellations—
figured out that the towers, taken in the order of their construction, must
spell out a code. Some of these towers even have the mysterious
T
carved
on lintels or beside doorways. If one writes down the first letters of the
zodiacal names of each of these towers, including the signifier
T,
then
it spells... absolutely nothing.

But then this author
remembered that the Templars were drawn to the number 2. For Templars, the
symbolism of two as one was powerful, and she proved this by reminding me that
the original seal of the Templars was a horse carrying two knights as if they
were a single rider. Okay, so look once again at the names of those turrets (in
Spanish and substitute “Señora” for Virgo): Tauro Castor, Géminis, Poloux,
Libra, Cáncer, Vaso, Señora, Sagitario, Escorpión, Capricornio, Peces, and
Aries. And now take the first two letters of each in this order and you form a
kind of sentence:
Taca ge poli cava se sale escape arcano.
It doesn’t
quite match up. But, she explains, one must jiggle with the letters a bit
because (I lost her here) something or other about old Spanish and modern
Spanish. Whatever, one ends up with this sentence:
En la taca que hay en la
“g” de la ciudad, cava, se sale al escape (o entrada) del gran secreto.
More
or less, it means “In the room in which there is a ‘g’ in the city, dig there,
and come away with the great secret.” The author of this book believes that the
Ark of the Covenant is hidden below this special room in a cathedral cave
filled with Templar wealth.

“Has the author entered this
wondrous cavern?” I ask.

“He cannot enter,” she tells
me sadly.

“Why not?”

“Ponferrada is a Spanish
treasure, registered in Madrid. He has applied to the government for permission
to dig below the room, but the officials won’t let anyone disturb a national
landmark. They probably think he is crazy. So, until there is some change in
the government, we may never know.”

She screws up her face and
snorts in disgust. Bureaucrats.

I peel off the equivalent of
ten dollars for the book. But she says it is only seven. The key to the secret
of the Templars has been marked down.

The accusations against the
Templars didn’t immediately play well in neighboring Spain or across the
Channel in England, where the knights were still held in favor. But after the
papal dissolution, the monarchs saw an opportunity. In Spain, James of Aragon dispatched an army to occupy the Templar castle of Peniscola. Better to be
prudent.

After the settlement of
Templar property and wealth throughout Europe, what survived was their story—a
splendid drama of political jostling, gems, gold, Crusades, forts, popes,
kings, and divine mysteries. The Templar story was so fertile that it
eventually became everything to everyone. Voltaire rewrote the story as a tale
of ecclesiastical tyranny. For others it became a proof of monarchal
oppressions. Antichurch propagandists of the seventeenth century performed the
difficult trick of recasting the illiterate Templars into wise philosophers who
foresaw the wrongheadedness of Catholic orthodoxy-—cunning dissidents trying to
work for change from within.

Almost five hundred years
after the Beautiful’s auto-da-fé, King Louis XVI was executed by guillotine
during the French Revolution. It is said that a member of the Freemasons, the
reputed heirs to the Templars, jumped onto the wooden platform. He ran his
fingers through the king’s blood, flung droplets over the crowd, and shouted,
“Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!”

The most lucrative retelling
of the Templar story repositioned them as warlocks and mystics, possessors of
written secrets, hidden treasures, and powerful relics. This rewriting began in
1531 with the publication of
De Occulta Philosophia,
a sixteenth-century
best-seller by the most notorious alchemist and magus of the day, Cornelius
Heinrich Agrippa von Nettesheim. In his book, Agrippa had merely mentioned the
Templars alongside another group of sorcerers called the Bogomils, whom he
alleged had orgies, burned the resulting babies, and made bread from the ashes.
A later book mixed up the allusions until it was believed that the Templars had
a ritual orgy to impregnate a select nun. After the baby was born, the knights
gathered in a circle and roughly tossed the newborn around in a circle until it
died. The infant’s corpse was later roasted, and the oil from its flesh was
used to wax the idol Baphomet.

Scarcely a decade passed
without the emergence of a clubby group of brave mystics, such as the
Freemasons, who married a new nostalgia for knights with a tincture of their
magic (but not enough to warrant charges of witchcraft or heresy). They wore
impressive uniforms, and the most convincing of them made good livings peddling
elixirs, cures, alchemical formulae, and the secrets of transmutation. They
spoke of their allegiance to “unknown superiors” and assumed increasingly
orotund titles. One neo-Templar in England was known as the Knight of the Great
Lion of the High Order of the Lords of the Temple of Jerusalem.

The exact identity of the
Templar mystery was hard to pin down. Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote
Parzival
and connected the Templars with the Holy Grail. Others claimed it was the Ark
of the Covenant. Another school said the knights brought back from the Holy Land the mysteries of engineering and that a breach in security resulted in Gothic
architecture. Still others traced the game of chess to the Templars. More
recently the Shroud of Turin is credited to the Templars. It was once in the
possession of the family of Geoffrey de Charney, the occupant of the neighboring
stake when de Molay burned.

The Freemasons and other
neo-Templar organizations created hundreds of different grades of knighthood,
with a fee for each ascendance, new uniform, and chest of badges. The mystery
of god was a cottage industry. Secret charters began to appear. One was written
in blood, another in a secret indecipherable code. Long, tedious genealogies
surfaced, tracing an unbroken line of Templar masters to eras long before
Christ. Bombastic constitutions appeared; one spoke of the priories of Japan, Tartary, and the Congo.

Some strains of
neo-Templarism faltered. In 1831 one self-proclaimed Templar tried to start a
new group centered on the supremacy of three men—Confucius, Parentier the
apostle of the potato, and the banker Lafitte. It didn’t catch on.

How did Columbus discover America? According to twentieth-century Templar historians Michael Baigent and Richard
Leigh, “Columbus himself was married to the daughter of a former Grand Master
of the Order [in Portugal], and had access to his father-in-law’s charts and
diaries.”

When these historians
approach the subject of the neo-Templars and America, they find connections
everywhere. Ben Franklin was knighted the provincial grand master of Pennsylvania in 1734. Later, while in France, he was dubbed the master of the nine sisters
and was later accepted into the Royal Lodge of Commanders of the Temple West of Carcassonne. George Washington, Paul Revere, and John Hancock were Freemasons.
The philosopher behind the American political idea, Montesquieu? Freemason.

To read the history of America from the pages of Templar-fired imaginations is to learn that our founding was less
a revolution than a conspiracy. Of the signers of the Declaration of
Independence, possibly a third were Freemasons. Nearly half of the general
officers of the Continental army were Freemasons. The minutes for the November
30, 1773, meeting of the St. Andrew’s Lodge in Boston contain this significant
note: “consignees of the Tea took up the Brethren’s time.” This phrase is held
up as proof that the Boston Tea Party was a Templar soiree. George Washington’s
appointment as commander in chief was fixed by fellow Freemasons.

According to this strain of
thinking, the Templar mysteries had at last found its ultimate expression, the
Constitution of the United States. The idea of the rights of man, the precept
that power should be invested in continuous offices and not in people, the
theory of federalism, and the notion of checks and balances are old Templar
methods of bureaucratic organization that date back to the time of Tutankhamen.
“Philosophers such as Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, and the French
philosophes
are regularly enough invoked,” write Baigent and Leigh of the origins of the
American idea, “but the Freemasonic milieu which paved the way for such
thinkers, which acted as a kind of amniotic fluid for their ideas and which
imparted to those ideas their popular currency, is neglected.”

The most visible evidence of
Templar control of the American experiment apparently is Washington, D.C., itself. Tour guides may say that the Frenchman Pierre l’Enfant designed the city, but
they neglect to add that George Washington himself altered the plan. If you
look carefully at the great Mall and the grid streets bisected by diagonal
boulevards, you might notice “octagonal patterns incorporating the particular
cross used as a device by masonic Templars.” For some Templars passing over the
capital by plane, a simple glance out the window confirms that the ancient
mystery has at last found a local habitation and a name.

After the sun goes down in
Ponferrada, the town withdraws. The storekeepers turn out the lights, and bolt
the doors. The houses too are dark. The little balconies seem dressed in
mourning, lined with flowers colorless in the night light, or draped in the
afternoon’s laundry snapping the iron rails. From one or the other balconies
stare faces of fatigue, a tired housewife, a housebound teenage girl, an old
man taking his cigar in the cool air. Ponferrada is in retreat, and the refuges
are the bars.

At the dark woody
establishment where I left my dinner companions, other pilgrims and more locals
have gathered. Above the head of the bartender hang haunches of Spanish
prosciutto dripping grease into tiny cups. On a scarred mahogany bar is a setting
of small plates, tapas of roasted peppers, ham and bread, Spanish omelet.
Outside and in, crowds form at small tables.

“You are an American,” says
a German pilgrim I have encountered once or twice before. He introduces me to
an angry Spaniard who wants to know if the military installation a few miles
back up the road is under the control of the American military establishment.
Several years ago Spain joined NATO, apparently under some kind of pressure
from American politicians. On the road today, I saw several splashes of
graffiti that translate “Spain. NATO. Out.”