Fantastic Metropolis

Now, for some reason or other best known to themselves, the translators of the Bible have carefully crowded out of existence and smothered up every reference to the fact that the Deity is both masculine and feminine. They have translated a feminine plural by a masculine singular in the case of the word Elohim. They have, however, left an inadvertent admission of their knowledge that it was plural in Genesis iv. 26: “And Elohim said: Let Us make man.” Again, how could Adam be made in the image of Elohim, male and female, unless the Elohim were male and female also?

—Aleister Crowley, 777 and other Qabalistic Writings

In light of the visions of Hildegard of Bingen and the later visions of Jeanne la Pucelle, the Maid of Orleans known to us today as Joan of Arc, it’s interesting to consider that one of the ways the divine might have reacted (keeping in mind Blake’s idea that “all gods reside in the human breast”: that is to say, we imagine the multitude of gods and goddesses in reaction to the simultaneously infinite and contracted tsimtsum of the Ain Sof Aur, the limitless light that contains within it all possible outcomes and conceptions… even opposites) was by asserting its Sophia essence, the divine wisdom that helped bring the physical world into existence alongside the Ophite Samael/Michael serpent (which always reminds me of the ouroboros), by inspiring women of sympathetic mind to action. Hildegard was made to preach, and her possibly sympathetic visions are turned towards the eradication of heresy. Joan was made to bear a sword, and burned to death by a court controlled by her enemies. Were these the result of move and counter-move between those who would re-imagine the face of God and the godhead’s own counter, similar to an immune system trying to ward off the viral attack of various groups?

It’s interesting to consider the time from the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, and the foundation of the Knights Templar as “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ,” to the mission of Hugh de Payens in 1127 that saw Fulk V of Anjou married to Melisende, child of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem. The marriage itself had very little effect: by 1187, Jerusalem had fallen to the Egyptians led by Saladin. However, a more long-lasting result of Fulk’s marriage was the simultaneous match Hugh created between Geoffrey, Fulk’s son, and Matilda of England, the then-heir designate of England. This marriage blocked the ambitions of Matilda’s cousin Stephen of Blois, son of an ally (also named Stephen of Blois… you get a lot of this in the Medieval period, as Simon de Montfort the Elder and Simon de Montfort the Younger will show us later) of Raymond of Toulouse and one of the original Crusaders (Raymond was first crusader to go over the wall into Jerusalem, even before Baldwin or Hugh de Payens’s patron Hugh of Champagne… and see what I mean about all the confusing Medieval names?) as well as direct ancestor of the Raymond of Toulouse who found himself attacked by Simon de Montfort as one of the Cathar-sympathizing lords of Languedoc. In addition to creating the Plantagenet dynasty, the Templars later honored their greatest servant and knight, the famous William Marshal, who prevented Richard the Lion-Hearted from helping Philip II overthrow his father Henry II (Philip being the Augustus we’ve mentioned before, that powerful Capetian king who would later check Richard’s nephew Otto IV and his brother John at Bouvines). William was a figure out of legend, the son of a proud lord who was set out into the world with little more than a horse and armor (and to a knight, expected to be able to provide arms and warriors for his feudal lord, this is poverty) and who earned a reputation as the most fearsome knight on the tournament grounds, and then the strongest warrior in Christendom, who defeated an army sent by Philip Augustus into England to overthrow King John’s young son Henry III when he was over seventy years old. William rode into battle and killed the enemy commander, a man half his age, and took no wounds doing so… He was in his seventies. Despite his bravery in battle, Marshall couldn’t prevent Henry III from holding the reins of England lightly for the next decade, because he died shortly after ensuring that a Plantagenet king, and not a Capetian, would sit on the Stone of Scone and be crowned king of England. But in death, William Marshal would be acclaimed a Templar, just as on his death-bed the Plantagenet king Richard would be said to have left the Templars his overweening pride.