Tag: worship

So – where was Jesus really crucified? An Easter mystery!

Posted on by Tony McMahon

Back in 2012, I visited the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – a real hotch-potch of a church on different levels and sprawling over a large area. Within its ancient walls dating back to the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine is the reputed site of the crucifixion.

But not everybody agrees.

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The crypt of the Holy Sepulchre

Every year, thousands of pilgrims trudge up the Via Dolorosa – as I did – following the last footsteps of Jesus to his place of death. The cobbled road is punctuated with all those familiar sites – such as the point at which he fell and where his face was wiped.

And it all ends up in the Holy Sepulchre. Within the church you can venerate the spot at which the cross was erected and also the tomb of Jesus.

It’s all rather convenient, a sceptic might think. What a happy accident to have both these sacred places under one roof. And the discovery of the location of the crucifixion and the tomb were made by the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine, on a state visit to Jerusalem in the fourth century AD. In fact, Helena just found one miraculous biblical item after another during her stay.

But there are problems. Was the crucifixion really carried out within the city walls? Wouldn’t it have been more likely for grim executions to be conducted outside the gates, by the local rubbish tip for example, away from the houses of local citizens? You have to consider that the bodies were normally left to rot and be picked at by animals for days afterwards. Did people really want to see that outside of their window?

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The  Garden Tomb – the real site of Jesus’ burial?

Also, where is the skull-shaped hill of Golgotha?

This question led some Christians in the nineteenth century, mainly Protestants, to pick a spot for the crucifixion outside the city walls near a tall mound that does appear to have a skull-like appearance. It’s just north of the Damascus gate. They also alighted on an old tomb nearby as the final resting place of the Messiah – the so-called Garden Tomb.

Now, some critics have argued that this theory has more to do with Protestants having no control over any part of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Even today, that church is divided between the Roman Catholic, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syrian, Armenian and Greek orthodox churches. They occasionally fight each other in turf wars over who controls which bit of the church – and they’re certainly not letting the Protestants get a look in.

All I can say is that while I adore the Holy Sepulchre, it’s not a convincing site for the crucifixion. However, the Knights Templar thought it was and their churches all over Europe replicated the circular design of the Holy Sepulchre. I’m sure many of you will feel that the symbolic significance is more important than the reality. But some of you may not. So what is the truth?

When you approach the site of the crucifixion at the Holy Sepulchre, there can sometimes be scenes of deep religious ecstasy. You may think I was a bit naughty doing this but on my old iPhone (so apologies for the grainy quality), I filmed some Russian nuns showing their devotion in 2012 before the place where Jesus was executed by the Romans.

Sacred statues without hair and clothes

Posted on by Tony McMahon

2017-08-05 14.28.56I was in Lisbon in August of this year and made an interesting discovery…

This year, I was walking up a steep hill in Lisbon to visit the medieval cathedral. This austere fortress-like edifice was built after the city was taken from its Muslim rulers by the Templars and the Portuguese army – assisted by many foreign crusaders – in the year 1147.

What the Christians found when they entered the city was a huge mosque at its centre. This was torn down and the cathedral erected in its place.

It’s not the most attractive medieval building in Europe and with its thick walls and arrow slit windows, you get the impression that the citizenry were expecting their former rulers to try and return and recapture the place.

It’s hard to imagine that there was ever a Muslim city here, at the westernmost end of a global medieval caliphate stretching from India to the Algarve in southern Portugal. Algarve, by the way, is from the Arabic “Al-Gharb” meaning the west. The city had been in Muslim hands for over four hundred years. It’s been the capital of Catholic Portugal for the last eight hundred years. So the Islamic heritage has been largely erased.

2017-08-05 14.28.27-1Half way up the hill, I found an antique shop selling statues from the 17th to 19th centuries that had once adorned churches in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal. Curiously, many of items had lost their clothes and hair at some point. So pictured here is Jesus Christ with the bloodied wounds from his crown of thorns but the crown, his hair and robes have gone.

What you’re left with is the puppet-like body that was always underneath to be manipulated as the church saw fit. His arms could be extended, his legs crossed, his head bowed, whatever was required.

This would have been little different to statues of the medieval period and today, as in those times, these are often carried in processions around the streets on special feast days.

Quite a morbid shop I must say, but completely fascinating.

 

Ten accusations made against the Knights Templar

Posted on by Tony McMahon

Templar artworkIn 1307, the Knights Templar were rounded up, imprisoned and tortured under secret orders issued by the King of France. The trials of top Templars would last for years and lead to many being burnt at the stake including the last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay. He was incinerated in public in front of Notre Dame cathedral.

A string of scandalous accusations were made against the Knights Templar to justify smashing the order. I recommend Malcom Barber’s detailed account of The Trial of the Templars if you want to learn a lot more.

MolayHere were some of the most noteworthy charges:

  1. New entrants to the Templar order had to deny Christ, the Holy Virgin and the saints
  2. Templars were told that Christ was a false prophet and there was no hope of receiving salvation through belief in him
  3. Knights were ordered to spit on a crucifix and even urinate or trample on it
  4. The order worshipped a head of some description, possibly that of a cat or with three faces or an idol called Baphomet
  5. This idol was encircled with cords, which the Templars then wore around their waists
  6. The Knights Templar rejected the sacraments of the Catholic church
  7. It was thought that the Grand Master and other leading Templars could absolve sins even though they were laymen and not priests
  8. New entrants were kissed on the mouth, the navel, the stomach, the buttocks and the spine and homosexuality was encouraged
  9. The Templars were only interested in financial gain and pocketed donations for their own use
  10. Chapter meetings and initiations were held in strictest secret with only Templars present and those that revealed any details to people outside of the order would be punished with imprisonment or death

A short film from the Smithsonian includes a reenactment of what the alleged initiation ritual looked like.

The Devil at the movies!

Posted on by Tony McMahon

Portraying the Devil in film is not an easy task – as hard as it was to portray him in paint on the wall of a medieval church.  Is he a fallen angel or a hairy beast?  Does he appear to us as a human or a monster?  One Spanish movie – El Dia de la Bestia (released 1995) – depicted him as an enormous goat headed creature.  In this rather bizarre film, a Catholic priest discovers that Anti-Christ is to be born in Madrid in the year 2000.  To summon up the devil and kill his creation, the priest deliberately sets out to do evil deeds in the hope the devil will take notice of him.  It’s a black comedy for sure with typical Spanish anarchic humor.

While the Devil is indisputably a beast in that Spanish movie – he’s in human form for the movie Devil released last year.  A group of people trapped in an elevator discover that somebody among them is not quite what they seem.  When the lights go out – this individual bites!

There are those like Faust who summon the devil to make a pact they come to regret at leisure – either for riches or in the case of the 1961 movie The Devil’s Partner, for the return of youth.  You can watch the entire movie from Openflix at this link:

Of course there are those unwise souls who get together to indulge in black masses or covens to conjure spells and mess with dark forces.  One very underrated Horror movie – Blood on Satan’s Claw (released 1971) – shows a group of young villagers in seventeenth century England indulging in Satanic practices at a time when witch burning was at its height.  You can see the full movie here:

 

Baphomet and the Sack of Constantinople

Posted on by Tony McMahon

baphometThere can hardly have been a worse event in the Middle Ages than the sacking of the great city of Constantinople by a crusader army – a Christian army destroying a Christian city.  The scars of that incident can still be seen in modern Istanbul in the remains of Byzantine monuments stripped of their gold and jewels and left as naked stone.

This was the high point – or low point – of the Fourth Crusade where the Doge of Venice, Dandolo, re-directed a crusader army that owed him vast sums of money towards his commercial enemy Constantinople and away from Saracen/muslim targets like Cairo.  Ignoring threats of excommunication from the pope, Dandolo – in his nineties and blind – personally led the crusader force in its attack on “The City” as Constantinople was known.

It’s hard to appreciate that Constantinople, situated at the end of the Silk Route and at the crossing point between Europe and Asia was by far the wealthiest metropolis in the early middle ages.  Its roofs and domes were covered in gold and to contemporary eyes, it literally shone as one approached it. The huge walls encircling it, built by the Roman emperor Theodosius in the fifth century, had never been breached – even by vast Arab armies – and were assumed to be impregnable.

To those crusaders who now decided to rape the city of its vast booty, the religious justification – and this applies to the Templars involved as well – would have been the schism between Rome and Christian church in the east.  The Greek speaking Christians of Constantinople were out of communion with the pope and their rite was deemed to be heretical.

On a more worldly level, the Byzantine emperors who ruled the city had long resorted to crafty diplomacy and a high level of duplicity to maintain their empire which had once dominated the eastern Mediterranean but was now being squeezed by conquering Turkish armies as well as Christian kings in Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia.

Once the crusaders got in to the city, they burnt and plundered with an unseemly ferocity and made a point of desecrating the ancient cathedral of the Hagia Sophia (holy wisdom).  This included crowning a whore on the bishop’s throne.  There is a contemporary description of this event:

“Nay more, a certain harlot, a sharer in their guilt, a minister of the furies, a servant of the demons, a worker of incantations and poisonings, insulting Christ, sat in the patriarch’s seat, singing an obscene song and dancing frequently.”

All of the above is fact now where we stray in to the realms of Templar conjecture is the belief that this is when the Order acquired the head of the Baphomet.  Quite what the ‘Baphomet’ is – head of the devil, goat’s head, Mohammed’s head – is anybody’s guess.  And there’s not much if anything by way of contemporary documents to say that the Templars believed they had such a thing.

Our only lead is the ramblings of a Templar during the great trials when the Order was suppressed.  Having been subjected to torture by the French king’s agents – and this was a hundred years after the sack of Constantinople – he claimed the Templars did indeed worship a head of something called Baphomet.  Historical detectives have to decide whether there was something to this or an example of people saying anything when they’re being stretched on a rack.

However, there’s no reason to suppose that the Templars didn’t walk away with a few religious trophies including the head of Saint Euphemia – which they claimed to have – though confusingly, her entire body is today held in the church of Saint George in Istanbul.

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Royston Cave – what were the Templars doing down there?

Posted on by Tony McMahon

royston-caveSome investigators believe the Templars were using a network of Neolithic caves throughout the UK for religious/mystical purposes.

Royston is a bell shaped cave, man made or shaped with a ventilation hole.  The symbols carved on the wall bear an uncanny resemblance to Templar images seen at their properties throughout Europe and the Middle East.  It’s thought that the strange inscriptions in the cave at Royston are a form of hieroglyphic text that the Templars discovered in outremer – an ancient form of writing long forgotten.

These are some of the identified carvings:

  • Saint Christopher near the entrance, the dog head saint carrying Jesus
  • Saint Katherine, revered by the Order is nearby
  • Saint Lawrence complete with the gridiron that he was brutally martyred on
  • A figure with a sword who could either be Saint George or more likely, Saint Michael the Archangel.  He is pointing to the apostles, the smallest of whom is the traitor Judas (author of a gnostic gospel as well all know)

Richard the Lionheart has been identified with his queen Berengaria of Navarre whose crown is above her head but not on top of it, as her status as crowned queen seems to have been disputed  The poor woman also had to contend with the Lionheart’s alleged preference for chaps over the ladies.  All good fun with the squires and knights no doubt.

There is a figure that looks almost Celtic in its crude simplicity who was wrongly credited as King William of Scotland – mainly because a ‘WR’ is scrawled on him.  More likely to be Saint David.  Unfortunately, the cave is covered in the grafitti of idiots who have seen fit to leave their names there – as if posterity would remember them on account of that act of vandalism.

If Royston is a Templar creation, it does beg the question of whether the Templars had other similar cave-like places of worship.  Caves have always been mystical places seen as bringing worshippers closer to the subterranean Gods but as the Templars, like all Christians, worshipped as sky god, it’s hard to see what the significance would be.