Fantastic Metropolis

Proceeding now to the Grimoire of Honorius, it is to the third bearer of that name, or to one of the most zealous pontiffs of the 13^th century, that this impious book is attributed. Assuredly Honorius III was eminently likely to be hated by sectarians and necromancers, and well might they seek to dishonour him by representing him as their accomplice. Censius Savelli, crowned Pope in 1216, confirmed that Order of Saint Dominic which proved so formidible to Albigensians and Vaudois—those children of Manicheans and sorcerers. He established also the Franciscans and Carmelites, preached a crusade, governed the Church wisely and left many decretals. To charge with Black Magic a pope so eminently catholic is to cast similar suspicion on the great religious orders which he instituted, and the devil thereby could scarcely fail to profit.

—Eliphas Levi, The History of Magic

In response to the murder in 1208 of his legate Pierre de Castelnau, Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against the “Albigensians,” as the French invaders, who spearheaded the crusade, called the heretics (after the Tarn town of Albi). A cycle of death and destruction ensued. The massacres at Beziers (1209), Minerve (1210) and Lavaur (1211) were chonicled in the contemporary epic about Simon de Montfort’s crusades, the vernacular Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, and the havoc wreaked in the region by de Montfort and his crusaders lives on in the local folklore to this day. The bloodletting ended only with the fall of the Cathar fortresses of Montsegur (1244) and Queribus (1255). Catharism had been contained, but not eradicated, by the French crusades, and the continuing suppression of heresy was entrusted in 1233 by Pope Gregory IX to the Dominicans. One of their number was the Inquisitor Geoffrey d’Ablis. It was he who almost exactly 100 years after the first crusade of 1209 oversaw the crushing of the last Cathars. By 1310 most of the leaders of the Cathar risorgimento had perished on pyres in Carcassonne and Toulouse.

—Rene Weis, The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars’ Rebellion Against the Inquisition, 1290–1329

When attempting to untangle the Gordian Knot of the Cathar heresy and those figures most tied up in suppressing it (figures like Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Dominic, Popes from Eugenius to Innocent III to Honorius III and beyond, the infamous Simon de Montfort) we find ourselves in a welter of motivations and possible contradictions. Obviously the Kings of France, resurgent under Philip Augustus, sought to unify the French-speaking lands held by the Kings of England and the powerful lords of Languedoc under direct royal rule, and the Capetians would be ultimately successful in dispossessing the Plantagenet King John and his nephew Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, of their European lands. So powerful would France become that eventually the Papacy itself would be split, half-dancing in Avignon to a royal French tune while the other half struggled on in Italy, a dance of pope and antipope. If the fact that two popes stared at each other across the divide of southern France, what was once Languedoc, in a parody of Ahriman and Ormazd, brings us to mind the Cathars broken and burning… well, perhaps it is more than a coincidence.

In the past, we’ve considered the slaughter of the Cathars as a movement by the Papacy to avoid losing the power of its most powerful weapons in the war on secular might—excommunication and interdict—as well as a means to the end of controlling the image of God in the minds of the faithful: by building in the heart of Europe a conception of God and Jesus as the means to martial victory, using Christ the Warchief as the inspiration for crusades in Jerusalem as well as Languedoc, it’s certainly conceivable to imagine specific inheritors of the Papacy as trying to create the impression (and impression can be reality) that Christ’s servant on earth, his Vicar, should be the Warchief of all Europe. Innocent III’s meddling in the succession of the Holy Roman Emperor through his cat’s-paws Philip of Swabia and Otto IV, and the eventual elevation of his ward and charge Frederick II of Hohenstaufen to the Kingdom of Sicily and the throne of the Holy Roman Empire showed how an ambitious pope could attempt to recreate the Empire of the Romans with another Bridge Priest in charge, as Augustus had been. (Pontifex Maximus, one of Augustus’ titles, basically referred to an ancient religious rite of blessing for bridges in Rome, and it survives today as the title Pontiff for the Papacy, much as the pagan priesthood survived in Iceland as the goði, a wandering judge and official, well into Christianity’s reign on the island.) It’s possible the bridge the Papacy sought to cross was the ancient “Bridge of the Separator” that groups like the Cathars and the Bogomils had inherited from Manichæanism and Gnosticism, that ancient Essenic/Zoroastrian inheritance of co-existent principles of matter and spirit, good and evil, light and darkness. Recalling the visions of Hildegard, which so resembled the Inferno of Dante Alighieri (born in 1265 in Florence, to be embroiled in the same controversy between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines that led to Innocent’s meddling in the Imperial succession 65 years before his birth), and the later visions of Swedenborg and his disciple and eventual eclipse, William Blake, it’s possible that the Papacy, under popes like Sylvester II and later lawyer-popes like Innocent III and Honorius III, sought to bring Satan back into the monotheistic relationship of the Book of Job: the accuser of the divine court, useful in defining and destroying one’s enemies. Did the Grimoire of Honorius stem from the same urge towards diabolism that would later see Borgia installed upon the Throne of Peter? It’s not that hard to imagine the Papacy, feeling beset by heresies, reverting back to the tactics of St. Augustine and using fire against fire. By creating the Dominican and Franciscan orders, one could argue, Honorius did exactly what a good diabolist in the heart of the Church would do to cover up his presence—it’s as easy to invert Eliphas Levi’s argument as it is to accept it on face value. How better for a master magician who seeks to recreate God in his own image to do away with his rivals than to set the hounds of the Inquisition upon them?

This was the religious war, the war for and against the attempted re-imagination of God, the battle to bring about the Blakean “re-casting” of God: as Blake could claim his many Zoas and yet still claim he was a monotheist, because all gods are one god, the Church under Innocent III and Honorius III and their heirs like Gregory IX sought to pare God down into a reflection of the Papacy itself, to cast the Throne of Peter in place of the Chariot and the Throne, to make God from the vast Adam Kadmon, the shi’ur komah containing all possibilities down into a Pope of the Universe, a reflection. Obviously, a Manichæan, forgetful of the idea that matter was as much the creation of the good god as spirit, would find the idea of trying to cast God as an emanation of an earthly Head of the Church to be anathema, an exaltation of the demiurgic Samael spirit. To an Ophite, of course, this would merely be a backwards, crippled approach to their own idea of the union of opposites, which makes sense, since it would be in the Ophitic Gnosticism preserved in Moorish al-’Andalus that the future pope Gerbert of Auriliac would first have come across these ideas: his rejection of Catharist principles would not have been a lie, if he were an Isma’ili-inspired Ophite borrowing from the formative Kabbalists of Spain who composed the Zohar, as opposed to the later Kabbalists of Languedoc who supplied dangerous wisdom to the Catharists via the composition of the Bahir a century later. In essence, beyond the fear of losing the power of exorcism, the Papacy could be seen here as worried about losing their monopoly on mysticism and spiritualism: the Cathars’ ideas were not the real heresy, being rooted in the same gospels (and secret gospels) that were used to keep mystics like Honorius in power. It was the idea that the Papacy itself wasn’t necessary, and that God wasn’t merely some sort of Super-Pope in charge of Heaven as the Pope was to Christendom and the Earth, that was a danger.

We remember Crowley’s argument about magic and the godhead: “In the first part we have seen all numbers as Veils of the One, emanations of, and therefore corruptions of, the One. It is the Universe as we know it, the static Universe. Now the Aspirant to Magic is displeased with this state of things. He finds himself but a creature, the farthest removed from the Creator, a number so complex and involved he can scarcely imagine, much less dare to hope for its reduction to the One.” We can imagine that, under the sheltering guise of rival religious orders such as the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, and later groups like the Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans (All set in opposition to each other, so even if each has a fragment of the truth—the Cluniacs the sic et non of Abelard, the Cistercians and Dominicans the wisdom brought back by crusaders and visions like those of Hildegard—they cannot bring it together in syncretic synthesis, for they never find common ground. “Opposition is truest friendship,” perhaps, but only if you examine your opposites), the secretive order of sorcerers at the heart of the Vatican started by Gerbert sought to break down the Kabbalistic riddle of Abraham and answer the divine equation though the process of al-jabr, the reduction of complexity. Meanwhile, those groups they most savagely attacked were either the Arabic possessors of Jerusalem (from whence Gerbert’s wisdom derived) or the Catharist inheritors of the idea of opposite forces. Of course, this is just a continuation of an ancient process that every religion embarks upon once in power, and a specific attack Christianity has made use of since its first inroads into Europe: the absorption and digestion of the gods and goddesses of rival faiths, the quite literal eating of the god that makes itself manifest in the ritual of the Eucharist, inverted to mean the gods and goddesses transformed into saints and leprechauns, only now the divine absorption is placed in a framework of subservience and justification to a God formed in the image of the institution originally intended to offer homage. Could this winnowing down of divine diversity, the burning up of spirits and gods to fuel the ascent of the “new God,” have failed to create a counter-reaction?

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.

Why would the Templars be so interested in the Plantagenet dynasty? Was it merely to check the power of the Capetians (who would, indeed, require checking, as the Templars would learn to their sorrow) or was it a subtle Templar way of pointing the Papacy away from themselves and checking the power of the Languedoc descendants of the original crusader lords? The Blois family were balked in their hopes of becoming kings of England, and the lords of Toulouse would be destroyed or forced to forswear Catharism. If so, we have to consider that, by the end of the Albigensian crusade, the house of Plantagenet was firmly entangled in Catharism.

It only becomes more interesting to consider the union of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. In one swoop, Louis VII and his Capetian dynasty were set back by the loss of the rich lands of the Aquitaine in southern France (not tremendously far from the Languedoc region) which were heir to a rich legacy of piety and unconventional thought living side by side. Eleanor herself was a most fascinating woman, possibly the most impressive and powerful woman to rule in her own right in the entirety of Medieval history. Had she been born a man, she may well have taken up the cross and fought in the crusades like her ancestors: deprived of that, she still went on a crusade, even if only to torment her then-husband Louis VII (who ultimately divorced her, as much due to her inability to provide him with a male heir as her numerous affairs—interesting that she provided Henry II with several sons one right after the other) and shock an easily confounded European society. The troubador culture she imported into England, in conjunction with Henry’s attempt to standardize English law, led to some difficulties with the Church (as Archbishop à Becket could have told you—appointed because of his long friendship with Henry, he became a very independent-minded defender of the Church’s ancient prerogatives, a vassal the Papacy was lucky to have… his death at the hands of four knights caused Henry to lose a battle with Rome, much to King John’s later sorrow) but ultimately would create a stronger England with a richer court life, even if it would have to endure the loss of its continental lands and the ascendency of the Capetians. Richly appointed with cathedrals and troubadors, the Aquitaine came into the Plantagenet dynasty alongside Eleanor, and for a half-century, the Kings of England were more French than British, high-stomached Norman lords with high-stomached Norman vassals owing allegiance both to them and to the French monarchs, vassals like Simon de Montfort.

Simon, who killed for God, and for his own glory.

In 1207 Innocent III had begun to preach the Albigensian Crusade, hoping that Philip Augustus would take the lead and prevent any excesses of behaviour. The latter’s involvement in the war with England prevented him from taking the cross, but he did permit his barons to do so: Simon de Montfort was elected as their leader. A soldier of great courage, he was also a skilled diplomat. He defeated Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, in 1212, and Raymond’s ally Peter II of Aragon the following year. It seemed to many that de Montfort and his allies were set on dispossessing the southern nobility and seizing their lands. Provence rose in revolt against the crusaders, and Toulouse was retaken in 1217 by Raymond’s son, while de Montfort was in Paris; he laid siege to the city 1217–18, and was killed in a skirmish with the enemy.

—H. R. Loyn, The Middle Ages: A Concise Encyclopedia

In the end, Count Raymond VII joined the hunt. Having failed to ride to the rescue of Montségur, the epigone of the once-tolerant Saint Gilles family helped persecute his own people. In June of 1249, he shocked his friends among the surviving Cathar gentry by ordering eighty people burned in Agen, a city on the Garonne to the northwest of Toulouse. By September of that same year he was dead at 52, shortly after having contracted a fever in the back country town of Millau. His body was taken to Fontevrault, the abbey in the Loire Valley founded by Robert of Arbrissel, the charismatic preacher of the early 12th century. In death Raymond deserted Toulouse, to lie in Fontevrault alongside his mother, Joan of England, his uncle Richard Lionheart, and his grandparents King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

—Stephen O’Shea, The Perfect Heresy

Wheels within wheels: the Albigensian Crusade moves from an attempt to suppress heresy into a carefully calculated effort on the part of Philip II Augustus to open a second front on the war against the Plantagenets—and a stunningly successful war at that: the Capetians would move from being barely in control of a small ring of influence around Paris and Orleans to ultimately controlling all of the Plantagenet lands in Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Poitou, as well as formely independent Provence and Languedoc, which, as we’ve just seen, was under the control of the Saint Gilles family, which began our saga as allies to Stephen of Blois but, through marriage, ended up allied to the descendants of his cousin and rival Matilda, Plantagenet in all but name. And so, we now have an exact inversion of the usual myth wherein the Knights Templar supported and protected the Cathars: instead, by the marriage of the Plantagenets who wouldn’t even have existed if not for early Templar meddler Hugh de Payens, a close ally to Bernard of Clairvaux, we see Raymond VII, of a family formerly quite tolerant of the Cathars, turning against them in favor of his blood ties to Henry III, who at that very moment was engaged in a battle with Simon de Montfort the Younger, who was as well married to a Plantagenet (Eleanor, Henry III’s sister) and was governor of Gascony. Simon would eventually take part in the Baronial revolt, reject the arbitration of Louis IX of France, and seize Henry and his son Edward (infamous to us now as the Longshanks, villain of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart and a man quite fond of ruthless and bloody executions to quell rebellion) at the battle of Lewes in 1264. Interestingly enough, de Montfort the Younger would also end up dead on the heels of his greatest triumph, when, like his father, he looked to have dispossessed a ruler in his own demesne: he was dead a year later as Henry escaped him and the Lord Edward defeated him.

While it is generally held in conspiratorially-minded circles that the Knights Templar were allies with the Cathars, that tends to be fairly easily disproved, at least before 1314: the Templars were founded by men like Hugh de Champagne and Hugh de Payens, with the assistance of that most fervent preacher of crusades and anti-Cathar agitator, Bernard of Clairvaux; furthermore, the Templars possessed estates throughout what would become southern France after the Albigensian Crusade expanded Capetian power, and could easily have taken arms against Simon de Montfort. As we’ve seen, the nobles of Languedoc held out against de Montfort and his successors, the Dominicans, for over a century before the final fall of the last Cathar strongholds. If the Templars themselves had been even sympathetic to the Cathars, they could well have stood alongside them. Instead, they did nothing at best, and at worst they actively aided in their suppression. It seems likely that they saw opportunity for themselves in the elimination of the Cathar heresy, especially if in part it echoed information they’d liberated in combat with the Isma’ili-descended Hashishin in Jerusalem proper.

What Gerbert might have discovered and Honorius codified in his Grimoire (be it sorcery, study of ancient Manichæan-descended gnostic doctrines with a Kabbalistic bent, the arcane and astronomical mathematics of al-jabr, or possibly all three, a derived understanding of the ancient hermetic doctrine of “as above, so below,” independent of whether or not the “above” refers to the stars as studied by the astrolabe, the true nature of God as derived from Adam Kadmon through the worlds of united thought and essence, or both) would have been derived in part through the ancient Zoroastrian magi and transferred by Islamic scholars and scribes (and possibly magi themselves infecting the Isma’ili, the Druze and other such sects) through North Africa into al-’Andalus could also have been discovered in Jerusalem itself. Jerusalem, the home of the Dome of the Rock, the first of the Qibla and, before Mecca, the place where the prayers of all Muslims were directed… those self-same prayers that now seek out the Kaaba, the stone fallen from heaven, the el-Hajarul Aswad. Those of us who consider that the Holy Grail itself, the lapsit ex caelis, is also a rock fallen from Heaven, consider then the Dome of the Rock, and then the Kaaba (legendarily built by Abraham, that supposed master of the Kabbalah and first to make the covenant with Yahweh, who would first become the only god of the Jews and then, after Jeremiah, the One God), begin to wonder about what the crusaders might really have been fighting over. What about the Holy City that has three religions tangled up in it, has seen many die over it, and so affected Raymond Saint Gilles of Toulouse and Stephen of Blois and Baldwin and Fulk of Anjou and Hugh of Champagne and Hugh de Payens and William IX of Aquitaine and their various descendants that they became entangled in a complicated array of alliances and oppositions (and we remember that opposition is surest friendship) that would last for hundreds of years? Why would Abraham leave Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh itself, Ur of the Chaldees which the Greeks considered synonymous with astrology itself (so that the word Chaldean meant astrologer to them) and travel to the future site of Mecca to create the Kaaba around a fragment of rock fallen from the sky? Why would his descendants create the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem around a similar fragment of star-fallen stone?

Correspondences abound. One remembers Sharru-Kin the Assyrian (Sargon II) trying to rebuild long-destroyed Agade by constructing it anew. Nebuchadrezzar II deporting the artisans of Jerusalem (and many other conquered lands beside) to bring them to Babylon and build the city up. I imagine the story of the tower itself, that primordial menhir where all men spoke the same language, and wonder about what, exactly, would the menhir really be for? I imagine a primordial web of power from long vanished Harappa and Mohenjodaro, where a hero cult so similar to the Babylonian flourished in the distant past, where ancient pre-Vedic cultures flourished and then vanished… did they bring their daevas west to Persia, the manifold gods that became demons to the Zoroastrian mind (and Blake might argue that all these gods and demons are just the limitless light of the Ain Sof Aur refracting through the manifold prisms of the human minds that experienced it) to interact with ancient Uruk, Ur of the Chaldees? Did Abraham leave his home when it was struck down by a lightning flash, a fallen star, a “bright son of morning” that plunged like an angel’s fiery sword to destroy that ancient construct? Imagine that it was even worse than that.

We discussed before Crowley’s observation that the feminine aspect of the Elohim was redacted out of the Bible by its earliest compilers. We know that it was in part exposure to the Babylonian Captivity and, later, the Persian religion of Zoroaster that moved Judaism all the way from a monotheism of choice (we choose to worship one god out of many) to a monotheism wherein there are no other gods to worship. What if the real disaster of the Tower of Babel was that it did exactly what it was intended to do and the shockwaves of that experiment were still, are still being felt to this day? What if someone decided to make the many into one? The Elohim were plural, male and female at once, the passage in Exodus wherein the divine name is contained (the 72-fold Name, the Shem ha-Mephoresh) is specifically about the Elohim, about their moving across the waters. What if the Tower of Babel was an elaborate construction, perhaps sponsored by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to map the sky and learn the True Name of the divine force that went by many names, and to remake it in their own image; to make of the whole host of the Annunaki, from Enki and Marduk the Sun Bull, Bull of Heaven, Taurus the Bull, the Primordial Bull itself, to Ishtar (that great rainbow of gods reflected by the prism of the human mind) one God, a King of Heaven, a Gilgamesh in the World Above to justify the rule of Gilgamesh below, a means to immortality for the death-obsessed king who claimed to be a god. It makes a sick kind of sense… Gilgamesh slays the Bull of Heaven, as does Ahriman when he makes war on Ormazd. To quote Yuri Stoyanov: “In his triumphant oration in the Selections of Zadspram (4:3), Ahriman claimed ‘perfect victory’ and recounted his feats of destruction which had despoiled the sky, waters, and earth. Besides withering the plants and blending fire with darkness and smoke, Ahriman assailed the primal Bull, who died” and it was David Ulansey in his The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries who noted that the cult of Mithras in ancient Rome was a stellar cult, one that observed the turning of the stars and the constellations (shades of Ahriman and his war with the constellations, the heavens themselves coming to Ormazd’s aid… like a stone fallen from heaven smithing a tower, perhaps) and the strange lion-headed god Deus Arimanus and his resemblance to the Gorgon of ancient myth, connecting Perseus with Mithras and Mithras with Ahriman, the slayer of the divine bull, connecting another hero cult with that of Gilgamesh, who sought to ascend into immortality (like, as an example, “a follower of the Orphic mysteries” which believed in the strict matter/spirit dualism which would later infect Manichæanism) by shedding the gross matter and becoming pure spirit, untethered, like Ahriman before being trapped in the cage of fleshly existence, also railed against by the Orphic cult, by the Neoplatonists with their IAO incantation, their own attempt to work out the equation of the godhead. Imagine, then, that Gilgamesh’s assault on the Bull of Heaven was by attempting to construct a vast tower to plumb the secrets encoded in the stars. This attempt failed, struck down by the fallen star, the rock from the sky, the god El-Gabal (who is Lucifer, the light bringer, the fallen son of morning) but too late to prevent the despoiling of Ishtar/Asherah, torn away from the god and sunk into the realm of Ereshkigal beneath the earth, where only the sacrifice of the King can retrieve her. Asherah, trapped by the Demiurge, the Divine Wife assaulted by the Lightbringer (as in that gnostic fragment of the Cathars of Desenzano), the union of Michael and Samael of the Ophites.

It really works no matter how you choose to frame it: it could literally be an assault on the very nature of the divine plan, an attempt to wrest control of the shi’ur komah away from the slowly forming group mind of humanity as it coalesces (a mass mind that Julian Jaynes might envy, as each individual human builds a mind out of the rainbow of gods caused when the Ain Sof Aur fragments in the prism of the individual will, and then each individual’s chorus of gods joins with all the other choruses, a steadily increasing spectrum of divinity, the Neoplatonic projection on the wall steadily reoccuring, the photons of infinity all one photon interfering with itself yet seeming an infinite series of individual particles at the same time), or perhaps Gilgamesh dragged down an alien entity, a consciousness of the stars themselves, what Johannes Kepler might have called a stellar daemon, and imprisoned one in the geometry of Ur itself, toppling it in the process, slaying Enkidu, his wild twin sent by the gods to make him less a tyrant to his people (and if this reminds us of Mani’s syzygus, the divine twin… did Gilgamesh strike down the better angels of his nature, his own connection to the wild earth and the power of nature, the dragon lines he used to power his mad attempt to ascend and forever pin himself into the cage of fleshly existence?), and toppling the primordial menhir, cracking the telluric web and trapping the goddess of the stars in the death realm of Ereshkigal, stealing from Elohim and leaving it just El.

The star-stones burn with the power of infinity: they can channel the twisted radiance of the many in one as it raged and smashed the tower by which it sought to steal the very nature of he divine. In the telluric web writhes the aspect of god which is Asherah the other half, or Ahriman the dark brother, whispering herself to himself, the “whore” and Ativad the destroyer at once, Samael the angel of poison and death and Eisheth Zenunim, the harlot or woman of whoredom, two halves of the aspect pinned in the dragon lines, the heart of fire pinned in the nothingness of the Qlippoth, “the averse and caricature of the supernal Creative One.” Sophia and the Demiurge, stolen from heaven by the slaying of the primal star bull, the guardian of the barriers between the infinite timeless, spaceless world where idea and form are one, where essence and container come together, an infinite piece of the limitless light, driven like a thorn into the good creation of Ahura Mazda, the agony of the imprisonment in the cage of matter thrashing about, creating the rage and the hate and the infinite host of ills like serpents dripping venom in the face of a god. We remember that the “Accursed Whore” was created by Ormazd. Why would he create her to serve Ahriman? She was Ahriman. She was his frenzy at his imprisonment, his desire to destroy the material world in order to be free from it, the fragment of infinity that sought to be infinite again, to burst forth from the cage of matter she/he found her/himself in. Why else would the infernal seek to rise and mate with the divine, why would God need to seduce the wife of hell to create a savior, to borrow two of the metonyms created by the Cathars to express a small part of the much greater whole.

One point should be clarified. The Gorgon figure is usually thought of as being female, whereas the leontocephalic god seems as first glance o be male. However, as Vermaseren tells us, the leontocephalic god “is shown nude, though often his sex is disguised by a loincloth or by an enveloping snake, as if it was intended either to leave the deity’s sex vague or to convey that both sexes were united in him and that he was capable of self-procreation.”

—David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries

With the fall of the Tower, the smaller menhirs remain: Mecca, Babylon, Jerusalem, El-Gabal, Megiddo. But they are caught up in the furious resonance of imprisoned, maddened divine power, clashing against each other. Madness rises, and men make war again and again, conquer each other, steal each other’s artists and craftsmen, to try again to raise the menhir and allow the pinned spirit to climb the long ladder back to heaven. The Temple will appear in the air when the end of the world is near. The God who made man, made man and woman in its image, and the tower attempted to redact the 72-fold Name down into one, to “solve” the divine equation because the magicians of ancient Ur could not accept that they, too, were creatures, the farthest removed from the creator, and sought to make the divine, limitless light limited, to reduce that infinite complexity down to One. Jerusalem burns with the magic of the star-stone and the infinite box wherein resides an infinite aspect, the will of the God of Abraham and Isaac, that small shard of the divine that did not go down into the ground, a purely male remainder of the Elohim that slowly became first the tribal god of choice, then the God, and asserted its remembered identity as God of gods, maker of all. The vibration of the divine interfering with itself.

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.

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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.