Transcription
A small group of us have come into possession of a large collection of Templar artifacts that we have christened the Toar Horde. So all because of where they were originally found, these items were discovered by some grave robbers in the early 1960s and have recently been put together by a close friend and colleague who realizes their importance far outweighs their financial cost.
There are 28 items in all, and their importance is not just their historical connection with the Order, but the fact that they tend to reinforce the validity of the criticism of Pope Paschal II, that the Templars were Gnostic from the very beginning and followers of the Yezidi heresy. They were not Christian in the sense that any of our viewers would understand the term.
To trace the origins of the Templars, you have to trace back the families who founded the Order, and they claim to be descendants of the Mamzer, the 24 High Priestly families of the Temple of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus and their descendants. When Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70, they scattered throughout the known world, and they passed their teaching down from father to child down through the generations. And that's how the Templars and the later Freemasons came a lot closer to the true teachings of Jesus than you will ever find in any Christian Church.
Christianity does not arise from the teachings of Jesus; it arises from the distorted visions of a man called Saul of Tarsus, better known to Christians as St. Paul. He's the man who deified Jesus and declared Jesus was his Lord and Savior, and that Jesus had somehow died as a humanized sacrificial goat to redeem us from sin. Jesus was a Jew, a Jewish teacher, a rabbi, teaching other Jews how to follow the Law of God. He was not in the business of starting a new religion; he was in the business of simplifying his own religion, and his teachings can still be found in Christianity, but they're so deeply buried amongst a mass of dogma, lies, and distortions, they're damnably difficult to find.
The Templars rose to power very, very quickly because the foundation of the Order was the fruition of a longstanding conspiracy. Bear in mind the early 1100s, communications in Europe were incredibly bad, so for things to happen at the speed they did, they had been planned for a very long time. The Templar Order was founded somewhere between 1095 and 1118. They were a body that were founded to be the militant arm of the hidden families, the descendants of the Mamzer, known as the Re'em, and they were not fighting for Christianity; they were fighting to regain their own true inheritance, the Holy Land of Israel.
They were incredibly astute. They were supported by a network of secret families that ranged right throughout Europe, and they were given grants of land, towns, farms, mills, quarries, the whole bit. And the profits from this were channeled to the Holy Land to maintain their standing army, which was quite a considerable one. It was the first standing army in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire, and to maintain it, they developed skills in banking and finance and land management which have never been exceeded. They held land from the Baltic in the North to the Balkans in the South, from Portugal in the West, right through Europe, up to and including large slices of the Holy Land. They had business dealings in every climatic zone in Europe. They had their own fleet; they transported people to and from the Holy Land, as well as their own troops and their supplies. It was one hell of a big enterprise.
They invented a precursor of today's credit card back in the 1200s, a precursor of our checkbook back in the 1200s. They even took a hand in what we would now call the package tour industry, encouraging pilgrimage and organizing it for people and making a profit from it. They were a truly remarkable Order because of their commercial activities, they transformed the face of Europe. By protecting the pilgrimage routes, they enabled overland trade to be conducted safely, and so a new class of people began to emerge called the mercantile classes, who started to accumulate capital for the first time. It was the foundation of capitalism.
And their banking skills were such that they lent money to priests and princes, to bishops, to emperors, to kings, and even to popes. They were immensely powerful and seemingly invulnerable. And then, due to the greed of an evil French King, King Philip IV, there was a mass arrest on Friday the 13th in 1307, when nearly all the Templars in France were arrested, handed over to the tender mercies of the Inquisition for torture, and charged with heresy. It was never actually convicted as an Order of any crime. Its leaders were based on confessions extracted under torture, but its Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, publicly renounced his confession and said he would not live a lie, and that the Order was innocent. He was cooked over a slow fire for his pains so that his agony would be as prolonged as possible, and his bones could be ground to dust so there would be no relics for people to follow. A hell of a lot of them were burnt at the stake, lots more died under torture, and the few survivors were disbanded as an Order by order of the Pope in 1314. Everybody in Europe became very, very careful; you didn't upset the Inquisition at any price, or you'd be invited along to the next church barbecue, only you were going to be on the menu.
Two years after the Knights Templar was suppressed, a new Order was founded in Portugal by a Portuguese King who came from a Templar family, and the Order was called the Knights of Christ. They were given all the Templar lands in Portugal. Many of the old Portuguese Templars joined the Order, and it was effectively the Knights Templar Order come again, just under a different name. But there were two rule changes. First of all, to join the new Order, you had to be a knight who was born in Portugal; foreigners were not admitted. And secondly, you owed your allegiance not to the Pope, but now you owed your allegiance through the Grand Master to the Portuguese King. So it was a purely national Order under the tight neck control of the royal family, and within a couple of centuries, the junior members of the royal family became the hereditary Grand Masters of the new Order.
They carried on the same belief system as the Templars. They were still heretics; they were still following the teachings of Jesus that he had learned from John the Baptist, and they still had their own secret initiation rituals about which we know very little, apart from the fact that they existed. And these rituals were conducted in underground chapels beneath Templar properties, as they had been throughout Europe when the main Order was alive. The Inquisition didn't exist in Portugal until the early 1500s, and there was a wave of immigration into the country from Spain of Jewish people fleeing from the Inquisition. They were closely followed by the Inquisition themselves, and it was at that point that somebody in the Order panicked, took all the possibly incriminating artifacts they had, and hid them for safekeeping so that the Order could not be accused of heresy again. They were hidden near the Knights of Christ headquarters, the Convent of Tomar, which is where they were discovered in the 1960s, and they'd been underground for the best part of 500 years. The Inquisition came to Portugal somewhere in the early 1500s, so the dates fit with the conditions of the artifacts as they were removed from the earth and as we have them today.
And the nature of the artifacts is such that in a lot of cases, their links to what the Church would call heresy are plainly obvious. But what is heresy? The Church defines it as any distortion of divinely revealed truth that the Church claims to be true, whether that distortion is by a believer or an unbeliever. I keep it simple: it's the use of your God's gift of free will in matters of faith and belief that constitutes heresy because the Church selects its own agenda and persecutes anybody who doesn't subscribe to it. It's as simple as that.
The items, item by item, are just artifacts. There's a chalice, there's a processional cross, there's a Templar sword, there's some interesting dishes, there's a carved crystal vase. It's the decoration on them that's heretical in most cases, and the rituals in which they were used, which would have infuriated the Church authorities at the time. We can point out heretical symbolism. What we can't do is give you precise details of how these items were used because if the Templars had records of their initiation rituals, then they were suppressed either by the Templars themselves or by the Inquisition. And it may well have been, and it's quite likely so, that the initiation rituals were handed down orally rather than being written, because oral tradition in this world of spirituality is the most common form of transmission. Traditions have passed down through ritual and storytelling, as they still are in modern-day Freemasonry. So it's the symbolism that is the key issue on several of these items, and I rather suspect from the nature of the items that we have in this collection that some of them were distinctly heretical, and the rest were just hidden because they were used in ritual purposes and nobody wanted to take any chances whatsoever with their freedom.
The ivory figures in our collection are repetitive in a sense. They're all superbly carved; the workmanship is incredible, and ivory was a very rare commodity. Their age range could be for anything from 800 to 1200 years old. Some of them were very definitely carved in the Eastern Empire in Byzantium, and others in the West. They all depicted the same person: St. John the Baptist. St. John the Baptist was a close associate of Jesus of approximately the same age, and the Church has always denied the traditional role ascribed to him in spiritual tradition, which is as the teacher of Jesus.
Now, according to the Re'em hidden tradition, John the Baptist was indeed a cousin of Jesus, but from the Ethiopian branch of the line of David, being a descendant of Menelik, the child of Solomon and Sheba. And that he had left Ethiopia to go to the Jewish Temple at Heliopolis, found it was polluted, moved from there to Jerusalem, found that Temple too had been polluted, and he joined the other hereditary priestly families at Qumran and joined the Essenes, where he became the teacher of a sect known as the Nazarenes. Now, the Nazarenes are an important issue here because the New Testament calls him Jesus of Nazareth, which is a bit odd. Nazareth was just a crossroads and a couple of hills; there was no village there. He was Jesus the Nazarene, and the whole idea of the Essenes was to create a spiritually elect within the elect who would sanctify the people of Israel and lead the forces of good and righteousness against the forces of evil in the final battle of the world. And the Nazarenes were the spearhead of this movement, and Jesus was a teacher within the Nazarenes. He was the star pupil of John the Baptist, and Jesus's star pupil was John the Divine.
And the reasons that the Knights Templar and the later Freemasons venerate the two Johns and do not mention the name of Jesus is, first of all, by adopting the second John, John the Divine, they took the heat off the John the Baptist connection, which the Church would have freaked over. And secondly, they're celebrating a process of transmission of teaching: John the Baptist to Jesus, Jesus to John the Divine, an initiatory process which was 5,000 years old at the time they started it, and which still goes on to this day. It's an incredibly effective way of passing down oral tradition in an unbroken chain and in a reasonably pure and unadulterated manner.
The figure of John the Baptist is vitally important, and wherever you look in Templar history in Europe, you find references to him. The relic supposedly containing the head of John the Baptist is kept at a cathedral that the Templars financed in 1204 at Amiens in Northern France. If you're here in England, if you go to Temple, there is a painting that the locals think is of Jesus, but in actual fact, if you examine it, you'll find it is a bloodless severed head, and it's John the Baptist again. And carvings of John the Baptist abound in Templar churches. In Chartres, the cathedral there is a very precise hole drilled in one of the windows, and at noon on the Feast of John the Baptist, the light that comes through that hole, the beam of light, hits a well-worn brass stud set into one of the paving stones of the floor. At the Church of Trion, there is an aperture built into the wall which, at dawn on the Feast of John the Baptist, casts the golden warm glow of rising sunlight all over the altar. Phenomena like that are common throughout Templar properties in Europe. John the Baptist was a figure who was revered by the entire Order and, to a certain extent, feared by the Church. So the Church always tried to diminish his role.
The importance of these finds can hardly be misunderstood. The chalices, in most minds, will evoke thoughts of the Holy Grail. The obsidian chalices, both of them, could be anything from 700 to 1300 years old. The style of workmanship indicates an Eastern European origin. The nature of the substance, obsidian, would again tend to reinforce that it would be either Turkish or possibly Egyptian in origin. Its use as a chalice as part of a ritual, is it a Grail? No, a Grail is not a thing; it's a process, but this is an essential step along the pathway to that process, the pathway to enlightenment. But a chalice like that plays an important part in the ritual that can lead you to spiritual transformation. We can't be precise about what part it plays because we don't know what was drunk from it. It doesn't matter which of those two obsidian chalices you're looking at; you're looking at a rarity. Obsidian is a natural form of volcanic glass, which is incredibly difficult to work, particularly to the high standard of craftsmanship shown in those two chalices. And also, it has both energetic and symbolic significance of its own right. Anybody with any degree of sensitivity who comes near those chalices can actually feel the power coming off them. Obsidian was known as Dragon Stone, and the winged dragon or the winged serpent is one of the symbols of sacred knowledge, Gnosis, Gnosticism, hidden wisdom, call it what you will. So it's significant in that way.
And the use of obsidian for a chalice, for a drinking vessel, is incredibly rare. Usually, obsidian was used to make jewelry or small sharp cutting tools for precision work, or more importantly, a clairvoyance crystal ball that was made of obsidian, or a scrying glass for reading astrological signs from the heavens that would be made from obsidian. So the actual material has a powerful impact on the object itself. But precisely what was drunk from that chalice is a matter of speculation, and the nature of the ritual during which somebody would drink from it is not known yet. Hopefully, with the announcement of these finds, we may get some indication if there are any people who know them. But the use of rare, powerful material like that is very common in initiatory ritual, and while we don't know the precise nature of the Templar initiatory ritual, we do know enough about initiatory rituals in general to speculate as to where these items may have been used.
For example, there is a beautiful marble libation cup. Now, that would have been used to mix something that would later be drunk, so one suspects a wine base and in 70 or 80% of shamanistic practice worldwide, some form of mood-altering plant extract. Other aspects of the initiatory ritual would have been chanting or drumming, which might explain why so many of these rituals were conducted in very resonant underground chambers where the echo faculty would be enhanced. The processional cross, we can guess that from a variety of religious sources that would have led the procession into the chamber or into the chapel that was being used. The use of the sword, we can only guess at, because it wasn't for knighting people; you were already a knight before you joined the Templars, or you weren't allowed in.
There's a certain amount of speculation here, but the insistence in the repeating symbols of wisdom. There's one particular cross called the Quetzalcoatl, which appears on several of our artifacts, which signifies hidden wisdom, which in the Church's eyes is a heresy immediately. There's the teaching aspect of the figures of John, there's the carving on the little vase which could well be Sapphire, the god of wisdom, and there's a mandorla at the bottom of that vessel which is worth looking at, which implies the same thing. It's constant repetition of a particular trend of belief: Gnosticism, veneration of sacred wisdom. And this type of belief predates Christianity and Judaism by many thousands of years.
The search for the Holy Grail predates Christianity by many years. That's got absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. There is a Christianized version of it. The ancient Celts had it: the Cauldron of Plenty. The Hebrew people had it; the Grail for them was the stone that fell from heaven. The Christianized version talks about the cup that heals, that gives everlasting life. Now, people have gone to enormous lengths to try and track down one version or another of these, and the most popular Christianized story supposedly is the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, that Joseph of Arimathea used to collect his blood after the crucifixion. Now, I have very considerable doubts about both of those stories. First of all, the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper would have been no different from the cup anybody else used at the Last Supper. And secondly, you didn't collect blood from corpses in Jewish tradition; it's the last thing you did. The corpse had to be buried whole and entire.
And that wonderful American professor, Joseph Campbell, when asked about the Grail, said, "Why should any medieval knight go out and search for a relic, however holy, when if he wanted a miracle, all he had to do was go to church and take communion, and he partook directly of the body and blood of Jesus?" He said, "No, the Grail is a coded allegorical description of the pathway to enlightenment." And to back up his argument, he cited a passage from the Gospel of Thomas: "He who drinks from my mouth, I shall become he, and he shall become me." And that, according to Campbell, is the whole point of the Grail. It's a transformative process; it's not an object; it's an intellectual and spiritual change. And the whole principle of alchemy was the same. Alchemy wasn't about transmuting base lead into gold; it was about transforming the base, raw humanity into the pure gold of spiritual knowledge and enlightenment.
There are all stories weaving around the same theme, which they couldn't be told in the open because the Church would have come down like a ton of bricks and persecuted you for it. The Church wanted a monopoly on everything that was vaguely religious, and they got it by brute force. So people had to learn to hide, tell allegorical stories, encode their messages in church art, in a different way to get their message across.
There is no organization in the world today, despite the claims some make, that is in direct continuity with the ancient Templar Order. None. The same teaching, in one form or another, can be found in different branches of Freemasonry because Freemasonry was founded by the same families who founded the original Knights Templar, so the teaching went down. There's not a direct connection, but there's an indirect one.
Everybody listening to this will later on today turn on the news channels, and they will see graphic illustrations of man's inhumanity to man, of man-made poverty, of famine, of disaster, of war. That's today's reality. Then think: do they need the principles enshrined in Templarism and in Freemasonry, the worldwide Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God, where everybody, irrespective of race, color, and creed, is treated with understanding and respect? Which world would you prefer to live in? These are actually the choices we have.
And the Templar tradition, the Masonic tradition, are not the only sole vehicles for this type of teaching. Every valid spiritual tradition in the world carries the same message, carries the same message that Jesus himself gave. And when Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," he was not saying something original; he was actually quoting from the Book of Leviticus, which was over 600 years old as he spoke. And it's a teaching that is central to the spiritual traditions of the Jewish people, people of the Muslim people, of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, and of every valid spiritual path. You will find traces of it in all the main religions, but they're obscured and they're hidden by a lot of unnecessary waffle and dogma and bullying and guilt-tripping. But ultimately, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," "Do not to others that if done to thee would be harmful," for are the whole apex and objective of every spiritual tradition in this world.
One of my favorite spiritual teachers was Rumi, who said, "There is a pathway that is the foundation for all the great faiths, that pervades each one of them, and then rises above them all, and that is the pathway of love. That is the pathway taught by Jesus, that is the pathway taught by the Kabbalah, that is the pathway taught by the Sufi traditions, and that is the pathway taught by the Buddhist tradition. And we need more of that today, above all times, not less."