Coincidence? Or could some secret group, capable of sustaining influence on the papacy over many decades, have understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs long before scholars learnt to read them in the 19th century?
Anu-Heliopolis was the archetypal ‘City of the Sun’ that Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella had been determined to restore. And we have shown that Bruno and Campanella were not alone but were part of a larger network of Hermetic and ‘Rosicrucian’ thinkers spread across Europe who had become very influential – though still not unburnable – by the mid-1660s. The defiant act of writing the name of Heliopolis in ‘invisible language’ in the midst of the Vatican's proudest stronghold is precisely the sort of symbolic and talismanic guerrilla warfare that we would expect of the members of such a network.
But there is no proof. The reader must decide.
An English Architect meets his hero at the Court of The Sun King
Let's now return to Paris in July of 1665 where Christopher Wren had just arrived, fleeing the Great Plague in London, and where Bernini was then also in residence, invited by Louis XIV to design the new façade for the Louvre Palace.
At the court of Louis XIV Bernini mingled with France's leading architects such as Louis Le Vaux and Claude Perrault, as well as the great landscape architect André Le Nôtre. Born in 1613, Le Nôtre came from an illustrious family of royal gardeners – his grandfather had been in charge of the Tuileries Garden at the Louvre Palace, and his father had been the chief gardener of Louis XIII. At the birth of the Sun King Louis XIV, Le Nôtre was put in charge of the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens. Later, at the peak of Louis XIV’s reign, Le Nôtre would design and engineer the famous Gardens of Versailles.
When Wren visited Paris, Le Nôtre was a mature man of 52 with an immense reputation at court. Since 1656 he had been in full control of all the king's buildings, and was on the verge of beginning one of his most ambitious – and least publicised – projects: the so-called Grande Cours or ‘Great Course’. The central idea was a wide processional avenue, starting from the Tuileries, that would open the outlook from the Louvre towards the west. It had originally been proposed during the reign of Henri IV, the grandfather of the Sun King. But nothing was done about it until 1661, when Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s all-powerful minister of finance, appointed Le Nôtre to bring the idea to fruition.
Le Nôtre's scheme somehow manages to be grandiose yet exquisitely simple at the same time. A contemporary plan now kept in the Archives des Hauts-de-Seine, shows a vast straight avenue (the celebrated Champs-Élysées), 107 flanked on either side by rows of trees, running westward from the Tuileries all the way to the Pont de Neuilly. Roughly at the centre of the avenue there was a flat-topped hill, then known as the Colline de Chaillot, on which Le Nôtre proposed to situate a huge piazza in the shape of a ‘star’.108 In the fullness of time the latter was to become the Place de l’Étoile where, in 1815, Napoleon commissioned the famous Arc de Triomphe, today perhaps Paris's best known landmark.109
It was amidst illustrious men, therefore, in a Paris buzzing with new architectural concepts and idealistic city plans, that Christopher Wren was to spend six months of his life at the formative stage of his new architectural career. And aside from the obvious lure of the architectural revival then underway, a flurry of scientific activities also attracted the Englishman. He met with the topographer Melchisédech Thévenot, the astronomer Pierre Petit – a collaborator of Blaise Pascal – as well as the Huguenot philosopher Henri Justel. Both Petit and Justel would themselves eventually become fellows of the Royal Society.110 Wren also befriended the physicist Adrien Auzout, who, like him, had cultivated a deep interest in architecture. Thévenot, Petit and Auzout belonged to the group of scientists we mentioned earlier who met, very much like a Parisian version of the Invisible College, under the patronage of Habert de Montmor. There was much talk of formalising this group under the charter of Louis XIV – again in the same fashion as the Royal Society – and members were thus naturally interested to meet Christopher Wren and to hear his views on the matter.
Wren also met Bernini, who had arrived in Paris just a month before he did. But at the time of this meeting, it is important to recall, Wren was to Bernini as a new undergraduate is to the head of a school of architecture. In short, Wren at this point was a nobody while Bernini was a giant who commanded the respect, the funds and even the patience of the pope and many kings and princes of Europe. In consequence the great Bernini was constantly swamped by his admirers while he was in Paris – so we may not suppose that he took much notice of the insignificant Wren.
For Wren himself, however, it was a life-changing encounter. To meet face to face, even briefly, with his architectural superhero, was an experience that affected him deeply. It is probable that from this moment on he was fired by the ambition that was to make him one of England's greatest architects. Here is how Adrian Tinniswood, Wren's latest biographer, sums up the meeting: With hindsight this meeting is one of the most momentous in the history of seventeenth-century architecture – the man destined to be England's greatest exponent of the Baroque in a face-to-face encounter with the most famous Baroque architect in Europe111 … The benefits Wren gained from his visit to France were considerable. They range from the experience of a more sophisticated architectural milieu than he knew in England, and a chance to exchange ideas in a less sophisticated, but still rewarding, scientific milieu, to the quantities of books he brought home with him – ‘almost all France in paper’.112
But Christopher Wren may have brought back something else, something perhaps less tangible than drawings and papers but far more powerful: a ‘vision’ of the new role he had to play in the restored Stuart monarchy. We shall return to the city of Paris and its exciting scientific and amazing architectural renaissance in later chapters. Meanwhile things became uncomfortable there for Wren when Louis XIV declared war on Britain in January 1666 in support of the French alliance with the Dutch. It was time for Wren to go home. He arrived back in London in March 1666 and within a few months an incredible opportunity was to drop into his lap – one that no one could have imagined in their wildest dreams … or nightmares as the case would be.
Rising from the ashes
The Great Fire of London began on 2 September 1666, apparently sparked in a bakery at Pudding Lane, near London Bridge, when Thomas Farriner, the king's baker, forgot to dowse the fire of his oven before going to bed. Some embers fell on nearby kindling and soon his rickety wooden house was in flames. In those days the houses in the city of London were mostly built with timber frames and pitched roofs, which caused them to burn like big matchboxes. Within a few hours several streets were engulfed in a swirling inferno, with the fiery progress aided by a violent easterly wind that fanned the flames. By the time the Great Fire had abated five days later, 430 acres, that is nearly four fifths of the city, had been reduced to cinders. About 13,000 houses, 90 churches and 50 liveries had been destroyed, and even the great Cathedral of St. Paul's had been ruined.
Apparently Charles II himself worked heroically alongside the firefighters, which earned him back some public respect. Nonetheless, the king's enemies were quick to claim that this was God's wrath for the debaucheries at court and the ungodly foreign policies of Parliament. A pamphlet issued by the Dutch, who were at war with England, called it a vengeful act from the ‘Almighty and Just God’, and the Catholics in Britain promptly agreed with them. Even the London Gazette was to report that ‘the heavy hand of God is upon us for our sins, shewing us his Judgement in raising the fire.’113 One also wonders what the Jews of London must have thought with Rosh Hashanah (Day of Judgement) only ten days away, and Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) a further ten.114
The rumour mill cycled wildly. Stories of a ‘papal plot’, or a ‘foreign plot’, or ‘God's Wrath’ were rife. Charles II did his best to persuade the angry population of London, now gathered at Moorfields, that their collective misfortune was due to nothing more than an accident. He vo
wed gallantly to take good care of all homeless Londoners and to rebuild their homes and their city immediately. But it is probable that the king was not entirely displeased at this opportunity, for he himself was a bit of dabbler in town-planning and design. Since the Restoration he had been bitterly frustrated by the lack of funds to transform London into a splendid metropolis that would eclipse the ‘City of Light’ that his cousin, Louis XIV, was turning Paris into. Now here, out of the blue, had come this amazing opportunity that might allow him to do just that.115
A new London, everyone hoped after hearing the king's emotional speech at Moorfields, was about to rise like a great phoenix from the smouldering ashes.
Or, better still, like a ‘New Jerusalem’, as we will see in the next chapter.
The major theme of the Knights Templar legend is its survival through the form of secret societies … The Templars themselves were a secret society … It has survived into Freemasonry … Freemasonry, then, is the heir of the Templars [and] purports to be the recipient of the ancient wisdom of the builders of Solomon's Temple coming down to them from the Crusades.
Alain Demurger, Vie et mort de l'ordre du Temple
Even a brief survey will show that he [Charles II] was dedicated to private alchemical experiments … Such a king could indeed be expected to provide the long awaited ‘Solomon's House’…
Donald R. Dickson, The Tessera of Antilia
I will not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand, till we have built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land.
William Blake, Preface to ‘Milton’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CABAL
A few days after the Great Fire had finally abated, Christopher Wren and John Evelyn, each man apparently acting independently, rushed to present Charles II with plans for the full reconstruction of London.1 To be precise, Wren presented his plan on 11 September 1666 and Evelyn presented his on 13 September 1666.2 The king is reported to have admired both designs greatly but in the end neither could be implemented because the pressing need of the time was not for grand architectural schemes but to re-house the tens of thousands of people made homeless by the Fire.
The abandoned plans of Wren and Evelyn would therefore amount to no more than a footnote to architectural history were it not for two very curious facts: • Both men ‘invisibly’ incorporated esoteric symbolic devices into their proposed layouts for the streets and plazas of London, and can only have done so with the same purposes in mind.
• Exactly the same symbolic devices, again apparently used for the same purposes, turn up more than a century later on the other side of the Atlantic in the layout adopted for the streets and plazas of Washington, DC, the newly-built capital of the USA.
The first of these symbols is the simple octagon. The second is more complex, with multiple branches and terminals, and is known as the Sephirothic Tree or the ‘Tree of Life’. It is derived from Hebrew Cabala, a system of Jewish mysticism that was elaborated in Occitania during the great period of intellectual and religious freedom that was ushered in there by the rise of Catharism in the 12th century.
The octagon and the Sephirothic Tree remain hidden in plain view in Washington to this day, as we will show in Chapter Nineteen, and can easily be seen by the prepared eye in Wren's and Evelyn's abandoned plans for London, which we will examine later in this chapter. In both cases the real issue is not so much demonstrating the use of the symbols but trying to find out why they were used in the first place. What was it that Wren and Evelyn, as well as their successors in the American Revolution, had in mind with these devices? Why would the octagon and the Sephirothic Tree have been significant to them?
The first clue that will help us to answer these questions does not lie in London in the 17th century or Washington in the 18th century, but in Occitania in the 13th century in an anomaly of the history of the Albigensian Crusades.
Mystery of the Knights Templar
We saw in Part I how the Albigensian Crusades that smashed the Cathars in the 13th century were mounted at the instigation of successive popes and fought by armies recruited from all over Europe, though principally from northern France. During the whole period of sustained warfare in Occitania, however, from the fall of Béziers in 1209 until the fall of Montségur in 1244, there were large numbers of seemingly obvious ‘crusaders’ permanently on hand in Provence and the Languedoc who took almost no part in the fighting at all. This is odd and what makes it odder is that these reluctant crusaders against the Cathar heresy were all members of an elite order of highly-trained warrior monks, sworn to papal service, who had already proved themselves in the Holy Land as valiant crusaders against the forces of Islam. Their full title was the ‘Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’, but they're much better known as the Knights Templar.
We do not propose to rehearse at great length here the familiar story of the Templars that has been told so many times before. But some background is unavoidable if we are going to work out why they abstained from the Cathar wars when we would have expected them to join in wholeheartedly on behalf of the Church.
The order was founded by nine French noblemen who travelled to the Holy Land in 1119 – twenty years after Jerusalem had been captured and occupied by the Christian powers in the First Crusade of 1099. The 12th century historian, Archbishop William of Tyre, tells us that ‘foremost and most distinguished’ amongst these nine men ‘were the venerable Hugh de Payens and Godfrey de St. Omer.’3
When the nine arrived in Jerusalem they were received as VIPs by the ‘Crusader King’ Baldwin I. They requested and were granted the right to use as their headquarters the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which lies on the south side of the ancient Temple Mount and still survives today. Traditionally held to have been the site of the biblical Temple of Solomon, the Temple Mount also houses a second splendid Islamic shrine that the Templars now took control of as well – the Dome of the Rock. It too has survived the centuries and may be visited today. Its floor-plan forms a perfect octagon with all eight sides of equal length, its lofty walls rising to support a beautiful golden dome towering directly above the eponymous ‘Rock’. This is the gigantic slab of exposed bedrock that is held in Judaic, Christian and Islamic tradition to have formed the original floor of the Holy of Holies of the Temple of Solomon. On it, the Old Testament tells us, once stood the Ark of the Covenant containing the tablets of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God – the god in question being Jehovah who the Gnostics and their later successors the Cathars saw as the evil second-class deity who had created the material world as a trap for souls. A Jewish tradition says it was on this same rock that Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac, on the instructions of Jehovah. For the Muslims it is the place from whence the Prophet Muhammad made his night journey into heaven.4
Solomon's Temple was the First Temple of the Jews, and biblical archaeologists today generally agree with the tradition that it was sited on the Temple Mount and most likely on the spot where the Dome of the Rock now stands. It was destroyed by the Babylonians when they sacked Jerusalem in 587 BC but the Second Temple was built on the same site between 537 and 517 BC after the return of the Jews from their Babylonian exile.5 In its turn the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70 and there has never subsequently been a Jewish place of worship on the Temple Mount.
This is why the famous ‘Wailing Wall’ has been of such enormous importance to Jews down the ages and is today the single most important Jewish holy place. It dates back to the time of the Second Temple, being part of a retaining buttress built by Herod the Great in the late first century BC. It escaped demolition by the Romans in AD 70 (because, says the Midrash, the ‘Divine Presence’ hovered over it) and in later years it became a potent symbol of the nationalist aspirations of the Jewish people scattered in the diaspora.6
From AD 70, until Jerusalem was captured in AD 638 in the early Islamic jihads, we know little of the history of the Temple Mount. This is partly because o
f the confusion of the period that saw the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rapid expansion of Islam, and partly because the Islamic authorities controlling the site do not permit archaeological investigations (although some illicit digs have taken place).7 Their reluctance is perfectly understandable since the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque represent respectively (after Mecca and Medina) the third and fourth most sacred sites in the Islamic world.8
Archaeologists believe that a Roman temple was built on the ruins of the Second Temple after AD 70. Six centuries later, in AD 670, Caliph Umar, the successor to Prophet Muhammad and at that point the absolute ruler of Jerusalem, ordered the Temple Mount cleared: … and a Moslem house of worship to be erected there, on the spot where Israel's Temple had once stood.9
That same year a temporary wooden shrine was put up. Then in AD 691, during the reign of Caliph Abd al-Malik, the permanent structure of the Dome of the Rock that we still see today was built. Under its huge gilded cupola it represented a unique concept in Islamic architecture of the period with its striking octagonal floor-plan encompassing a circular central nave containing the sacred rock of the Temple of Solomon. Some decades later Abd al-Malik's son, Caliph Al-Walid, built the Al-Aqsa Mosque.10 There then followed four centuries of relative peace under Islamic rule, rudely interrupted by the First Crusade and the capture of Jerusalem in 1099.