Fantastic Metropolis

Either way: fragment of the infinite all or incarnate star-spirit guarded by the slain bull-spirit (or both, or another more alien, writhing aberration from beyond even the stars themselves, a trapped Oannes, a slain Tiamat with the world made from her corpse, and a dead Apsu made the palace and power of Enki), the shattered telluric web once centered on the Tower of Babel pulses and burns with power that can be tapped from a lesser omphalos… the Isma’ili know it, told of it by Persian magi, and bring that secret knowledge into al-’Andalus for Gerbert to discover, the prison of flesh that holds the raging god, the two who together are infinity and yet opposed, opposite, and their dual seduction of each other to create a means to escape, to rejoin: since time and space are products of this limited prison house, the souls of men could be created and given the choice by Ormazd as a contingency “after” one of their own tried to reshape the very nature of infinity and insert himself into the merkabah in such a manner, and the meh’qabbah would later allow Abraham to create golems and grant them souls, making new worshippers for the one true God. Infinity runs forwards and backwards and outside of time, and the shi’ur komah contains all that exists, every individual thought and concept brought together in what might be seen as an implicate order, even those things which do not exist, since non-existence is merely contingent on what does not exist there, time itself. While Gerbert discovered the Hermetic rule (“as above, so below”) and the Bogomils learned of the great lie, the battening of Sophia by the Demiurge to make the mortal world, the place where the menhir first broke off a limb of the tree and created da’ath lies ruined, blasted by a fallen star, its death agony transferred to the mass of human consciousness. If one has ears to hear, one can see the agony of Hell, as did Hildegard or Alighieri: if one listens long enough, one realizes the fire in the web is the fire that speeds creation as well, for all light is light, even that of the lightbringer.

The Hashishin, from their Alamut where the star-god El-Gabal and his human stand-in, the Old Man of the Mountain, reside; the Templars themselves, plumbing both the Sephiroth and perhaps the Qlippoth—the Baphomet they were derided for worshipping has always reminded me of the Qlippothic Beharion—, seeking a balance and communion with the true Ain (similar to the Heyaschists so hated by the Byzantine patriarch) from the Temple Mount itself, the heart of the Jerusalem Menhir: Raymond Saint Gilles of Toulouse, the first into the heart of the storm, touched by the mystery the Desenzano would attempt to codify and opened to the Cathars, only to have his descendants join with an attempt to recreate the bloodline of the Arc, the access point of the Elohim fragment, by marrying Baldwin’s line to that of Fulk V of Anjou and Anjou’s heir to the Kingdom of England, where another fallen star-stone anointed her kings: the Papacy seeking to repeat the Babylon experiment and breeding out of the decadent and weak Merovingian and Carolingian lines (which, according to some, may have held the actual blood of Christ, that being created—according to Desenzano—by the union of the imprisoned Asherah and her Arc-trapped Elohim mate Yahweh, reaching down into hell for her) to make their own Hero, a new Gilgamesh who would claim the secrets of the Cathars, crush the Templars who might have stood in the way, and allow for the imagining of God as a kind of Pope of all Creation. One wonders if the Grimoire of Honorius was a complicated alchemical textbook on how to select for the proper breeding of a surrogate Hero, a mathematical treatise on stellar essences and how best to capture them, or merely a notebook on how to bring oneself closer to God by making God into an image of you in the minds of the faithful. Whatever it was, it was clearly useful to the magical order that sometimes held the Papacy.

They might have paid more attention to their breeding, as the Templars did: Philip IV the Fair, the arch-Capetian, would make the Papacy his captive, taking them to their own Babylon in the Avignon region of France… that very place France captured during the Albigensian Crusade, in the heart of the Languedoc and Provençal regions wedded to France by the slaughter of Simon de Montfort. Having divided the Papacy thus (Ormazd and Ahriman, split asunder by the Cage), Philip could afford to dispossess the Templars, burn their master to death, steal their wealth and their secrets, and prepare to create from the divine all a new God, one that wore the face of a Capetian king. Certainly, he could not have expected that the descendants of the Templar experiment, the “bloodline of Satan” left behind by Geoffrey of Anjou, could possibly rise to threaten him… his own daughter had married into that line, and she and her lover had killed Edward II and seized control. He didn’t know that, like Perseus before him, a grandson had been born who would make unceasing war on France and begin a hundred years of conflict that would kill any chance for a Capetian monarch to revise Catholicism on French soil, and only another who could hear the wisdom of God could in the end save his ravaged kingdom from absorption.

Even in death, the Templars weeded their garden well. They’d combined the Saint Gilles, Aquitaine, Norman and Angevin bloodlines into a shadow family with an equal right to rule in France, and welded them to the Kingdom of England where the star-stone made kings: the union of Solomon and David, the twin messiahs spoken of by the Essenes.

Discuss this and other heresies at Matthew Rossi’s message board.

Matthew Rossi is the author of Things That Never Were (MonkeyBrain, 2003). He has work forthcoming in Peter Crowther’s Postscripts magazine, and a new collection of essays, titled Bottled Demons, will be out this year from Prime Books.