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became an institution of the church. But the idea of a transformed reality, the Chilaist vision of a new heaven and a new earth purged of sin, refused to die out. This concept of a spiritually animated matter became the keystone of the alchemical process. The illuminated Hebrew mystics of the Bahir recorded the techniques of animating matter and related them directly to the transformational process of galactic alignment. The Shi'ites, Fatimids and Ismailis alike, believed that Mohammed had received this information and passed on the secret of time, and the coming of the Day of Judgment, through the family of Ali. The Sufis, of all persuasions, retained the most complete understanding of the internal psycho-sexual transformation. We found that by the 10th century, alchemical knowledge had fragmented to the point that the secret had effectively been lost. The Byzantine Greek compilations of that era are composed of older material, much of it from the 1st century, such as the "Isis the Prophetess" story. The Islamic current had likewise split into the compilers and philosophers versus the mystical and the political. Among the Jews of the Dispersion, knowledge of the Bahir was limited to several small family groups in Spain and Palestine. The information was on the verge of being lost, and it was hard to see how in a few short centuries it could have been revived and then become influential enough to appear on the cathedral walls. Working backward from the cathedrals themselves, we found that there were indeed enough mysteries to drive a small army of secret societies through. "Why did western Europe build so many churches in the three hundred years after the year 1000? What need was there, in a Europe with hardly a fifth of its present population, for temples so vast that they are now rarely filled even on the holiest days? How could an agricultural civilization afford to build such costly edifices, which a wealthy industrialism can barely maintain?" These questions were asked by no less an authority than Will Durant in his chapter, in volume IV of the History of Civilization, on the development of the Gothic cathedrals. And who designed them? Who decided on the artwork, laid out the ground plan, supervised the construction and the decoration? These are mostly unanswered, and now unanswerable, questions. We know the names of these "master masons," but their history and the story of their work has for the most part been lost. But the fact of that work, its skill and symbolic integrity, points to the sophisticated degree of organization, perhaps even on an international level, required to produce such elaborate and long term projects. Buildings of such complexity and elegance do not happen by accident. As Durant noted, the year 1000 was a significant one to western Christendom. As we began to investigate this significance, we came face to face with one of the seminal figures in the transition from the Dark Ages to the medieval world, Pope Sylvester II. As we saw in a previous chapter, The Hermetic Pope proved to be the lynch-pin in a complex series of events that resulted in effects as wide ranging as the Crusades, the Templars, the Peace of God movement and its heretical offshoots, the Grail Romances and eventually, the cathedral building movement itself. As we followed the tangled pattern of Sylvester's career, we found the seeds of our sophisticated international organization in the various chronicling orders established by Sylvester within, and on the edges of, the other monastic orders, the Benedictines, the Cluniacs and the Cistercians. This fluidity of organization gained a central focus with the establishment of the group of chroniclers at Jerusalem in 1002. From that point on we can safely speak of an Order of Sion, in Jerusalem, with connections among all three major monastic orders back in Europe. During the 11th century, all of these monastic orders began to build in the pre-Gothic style known as Romanesque. Within these monastic communities, groups of specialists developed. These were monks and scholars who knew Greek and mathematics, especially geometry, and were also skilled in building. As these "schools" grew, they were influenced by architecture from many distant places, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, The Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem, and the Mosque of ibn Tulun in Cairo. It is not hard to see the Order of Sion, with its Byzantine and Fatimid connections, as the source of that influence. After the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem, The Order of Sion became, in various ways, the "rock" upon which the Kingdom of Jerusalem was founded. The Order used its connections back in Europe to capitalize on the discovery, around the 1102, of the alchemical and cosmological secrets. A decade later, wealth began flowing back to Europe, mostly to the Cistercians, a formerly bankrupt splinter group of Cluniac monks led by the future St. Bernard. By 1130, the Templars had been established, St. Bernard was the foremost Christian of his day, and Europe was poised on the edge of the cathedral building mania. Gothic is in the air, but has yet to be given form. For that we have to thank St. Denis and the Abbot Suger. * * * * * [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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