Raising Hell (15 page)

The first recruits were an interesting assortment; some were men with a sense of divine mission, devoted to the promulgation of the faith and defending its adherents, but many others seemed to come to the order after lives of war and rapine. In fact, the order actively sought out and embraced any knight or soldier who had been excommunicated from the church; this was their chance to use their fighting skills, the one area in which they were truly proficient, to hack their way back to Heaven.

The order also proved to be fantastically successful builders, merchants, and bankers: from the mighty fortresses they built, most notably their headquarters on Cyprus, they gradually amassed great wealth and extraordinary power—this despite the fact that members of the order were required to take vows of poverty and lead lives of abstemiousness and celibacy. If a member happened to have already been married, and was bound by that lifelong vow, he wore a brown or black robe with the order’s insignia, a red cross, on it; unmarried members wore white robes emblazoned in the same way.

For generations, the order grew and prospered, until its very size and might began to nettle the pope and other more temporal rulers. Rumors had begun to circulate that the order had
turned away from its Christian purposes and that it had in fact embraced the dark side. Initiates, it was said, were made to spit and trample upon the cross while crying out three times that they renounced Jesus; they were stripped naked by the other knights and forced to submit to unnatural acts. And in the secrecy of their fortified castles and temples, the knights were said to worship a pagan god known as Baphomet, a creature with the head and the hooves of a goat, a pentagram on its forehead, and a green belly covered with fishlike scales.

In the early years of the fourteenth century, Philippe IV, king of France, saw in these terrible stories a great opportunity. In dire financial straits and running out of options—he had already expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers from his kingdom after stealing all their property; he had debased the national coinage—he decided it was time to make a raid on the Templars’ treasury. First, he relayed to Pope Clement V all the reports he’d heard of the knights’ blasphemies, and then, after receiving papal permission to take steps against the order, he organized his plot.

In Paris, the knights inhabited a massive castle, which was governed, as were all the order’s castles and manors, by the grand master, Jacques de Molay. The king, on October 13, 1307, arranged for an extravagant evening of entertainment, and he invited de Molay and all of his knights to attend. When they arrived, they were summarily arrested, and then, over the following years, interrogated and tortured until they confessed to the most heinous crimes. Those who did so were burned at the stake; fifty-four who tried to take back their confessions were taken to a windmill in St.-Antoine and burned, all the same. Condemned as heretics, their bones could not be buried in consecrated ground.

Even Jacques de Molay, while he indignantly denied all charges of immoral conduct with the other Templars, finally confessed to having renounced Christ and spitting on the cross; he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But on March 14, 1314, when it came time for him to publicly admit to his crimes from a scaffold erected in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, de Molay
flew into a sudden rage, recanted his entire confession, and declared that he was innocent of all the charges brought against him. That got him a new sentence, on the spot; he was tied to a stake on a little island in the Seine, and from the flames rising around him he challenged the king and pope to appear with him before the heavenly bar. (When both of them died within the next couple of years, many people assumed that they had been called to account.)

Bouc de la goétie Baphomet,
the goat incarnation of the Devil. After Eliphas Lévi, from a pen drawing in a French occult manuscript
La Magie Noire
(Black Magic), nineteenth century.
*

The persecution of the Templars, directed by papal decree, continued, spreading throughout Christendom; the knights were rounded up in city after city, tortured, and executed. And their vast riches were appropriated by the kings and clergy. But according to some legends, the order never completely disappeared;
its members merely went underground, as it were, forming an ultrasecret society whose goal it was to destroy the papacy and the ruling houses of Europe. Later societies, such as the Illuminati (a German order founded in 1776) and the Freemasons, were said to be its descendants.

THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSY CROSS

Although the earliest documentation dates from 1614, this mysterious brotherhood, which claimed to be in possession of the elixir of life (among other great secrets of the universe), traced its own origins to the fourteenth century and a wandering magus (almost certainly fictitious) named Christian Rosencreutz.

Rosencreutz—whose last name translated as “rosy cross"—followed in the footsteps of many great seekers and magicians before him, from Apollonius of Tyana to Cyprian, who traveled from the West to the East, in the hope of uncovering occult wisdom and teachings. According to the lore, Rosencreutz began his studies at the age of five, in a convent school in Germany, where he learned the traditional humanities. But at fifteen, his education took a decided turn when he embarked, under the wing of a monk, on a trip to the Holy Land.

No sooner had they arrived in Cyprus than the monk took ill and died. But the young Rosencreutz, thirsty for knowledge he could not find in his own homeland, set out alone for Arabia, where he was told some great adepts lived. When he finally found them, they welcomed him with open arms, saying his coming had been foretold. They taught him all that they knew of the occult sciences (he picked up the Arabic language on his own), and three years later they sent him on to Egypt, where the master magicians of Fez showed him how to invoke the elemental spirits.

But that was where his good fortune ended. Rosencreutz’s next stop was Spain, where the adepts offered him no respect, or help, whatever. In fact, the Spanish magicians claimed that they’d learned the secrets of the Black Arts from the master
himself—Satan—who’d taught them the finer points of necromancy in a lecture hall at the University of Salamanca. Rosencreutz moved on to other countries, but getting no better reception there, he returned to his native Germany, where he spent the next five years in solitude, writing down the secrets he had learned on his travels.

When that was done, he slowly and methodically began to gather around him the assistants and pupils who would form the nucleus of what came to be called the Rosicrucian fraternity. They created a magical language which they spoke only among themselves, an equally cryptic written language designed for magical incantations, and a dictionary containing all the occult wisdom they’d accumulated to date. They also started to put their knowledge into practice, using it, or so they claimed, to heal the sick. And they built their House of the Holy Ghost, a headquarters that no one has ever found, to serve as the repository of all their records and wisdom; Robert Fludd, an English Rosicrucian, asserted that this sanctuary was located at the world’s end, surrounded by banks of clouds, where the brothers breathed only the purified air of true wisdom.

When Rosencreutz died, he was buried in a secret vault, the walls of which were inscribed with magical figures. When all the other original Rosicrucians had died out, the location of the vault was lost. But 120 years later, when one of the brotherhood’s lodges was being rebuilt, the door to the tomb was found, hidden behind a bronze tablet, and reopened. Inside the seven-sided vault, they found not only the perfectly preserved body of their founder but various remarkable things—magical mirrors, small bells, the
Vocabularium
of Paracelsus—buried along with it. After debating among themselves, the brothers decided the time had come to make their order, and its miraculous discoveries, available to other worthy initiates in a more public fashion than ever before.

Thus, we have
The Fama of the Fraternity of the Meritorious Order of the Rosy Cross Addressed to the Learned in General and the Governors of Europe.
It was a kind of open letter, published in 1614 in the town of Cassel, Germany, and it called for a
reformation in science equivalent to that which had already occurred in religion. It was time, the pamphlet insisted, that men of science stopped relying on the authorities handed down from antiquity and looked instead to a new synthesis, based on moral renewal and the mysteries of the Grand Orient, which the children of light, the illuminated ones, the Rosicrucians, had obtained. Their symbol became a rose crucified on a cross.

As might have been expected, the pamphlet created quite a stir: some were anxious to know what this mysterious order had to offer, others (who already considered themselves adepts in magical practice) were offended at the suggestion that their own skills were somehow lacking. By the following year,
The Fama
had gone into three more printings, and two additional editions in Dutch. Capitalizing on their initial success, the brotherhood put out another pamphlet,
Confession of the Rosicrucian Fraternity,
which advertised for new members; selected applicants, it said, would be gradually initiated into the mysteries, and into the ranks, of the secret brotherhood. But there was nowhere to apply. All you could do was publicly state your interest and desire, perhaps by printing an ad or pamphlet of your own, and wait to be tapped for membership. It got to be a very frustrating process.

But the rewards were so tantalizing that scholars, magicians, and philosophers continued to line up. After all, the Rosicrucians professed to know the secret of making gold (for which they professed, however, no great zeal) and for the eternal renewal of life (for which they did). Their members were required to go about their business—in large measure, the healing of the sick—dressed in no special garments, but wearing the clothing of the local population; for their medical skills, they were forbidden to accept any payment. And at all times they were to maintain absolute anonymity, never announcing themselves as members of the secret fraternity. (As a result, it’s difficult to know for sure who was ever actually a member, but among others the signs point toward Roger Bacon, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Descartes, Thomas Vaughan, and Francis Bacon.)

In Dr. Cohausen’s
Hermippus Redivivus: or The Sage’s Triumph
over Old Age and Death,
translated from German into English by John Campbell in 1744, the case for keeping this low profile was succinctly made:

. . . the adepts are obliged to conceal themselves for the sake of safety, and . . . having power not only of prolonging their lives, but also of renovating their bodies, they take care to use it with the utmost discretion, and instead of making a display of this prerogative, they manage it with the highest secrecy . . . the true cause of the world’s being so much in doubt about this matter. Hence it comes to pass, that though an adept is possessed of greater wealth than is contained in the mines of Peru, yet he always lives in so moderate a manner, as to avoid all suspicion, and so as never to be discovered, unless by some unforeseen accident.

THE FREEMASONS

A mystical order, which for many years became a sort of haven for astrologers, alchemists, and the like, the Freemasons have had a long and ultimately mysterious history. Though scattered records exist, and legends abound, its origins seem to lie in the Middle Ages, in the freemasons—the itinerant stoneworkers—who raised the great cathedrals and other edifices of western Europe. As each huge project was built, it attracted a cadre of skilled builders, the architects of their day, who spoke the language of stone and structure, who formed close bonds with each other over the many years—and sometimes lifetimes—that it took to complete each building.

But what began as an operative guild, an association of men trained in the arts and science of building, over time became a more speculative order, one that embraced all religious faiths in a quest for universal brotherhood. The instruments of the stone-worker’s trade—gauges and tool aprons, compasses and chisels—became
symbols of more arcane practices and wisdom. A complex mythology evolved, claiming that the Masons had existed for millennia, that members of their order had been instrumental in the erection of everything from the Pyramid of Cheops (an assertion strongly promoted by Count Cagliostro) to the Temple of Solomon in Israel. “If history be no ancient fable,” went an English poem published in 1723, “Free Masons came from Tower of Babel.”

The Freemasons flourished in the British Isles, in particular, where the Grand Lodge, which was founded in London in 1717, served as the society’s powerful, central hub. It was here that the fundamental tenets of the society were drawn together, codified, and promulgated to other lodges far and wide. New applicants underwent an elaborate initiation ceremony, which gained them the status of Apprentice; later, they would move on to Fellow Craft, before eventually graduating to Master Mason. Often, in France and Germany, for instance, these ceremonies took on a decidedly occult cast.