Templar Globe

Sufism is typically thought of as a mystical branch of Islam whose practices developed in the Middle East during the eighth century and whose adherents can now be found around the world. But whereas some Sufis continue to identify themselves as part of Islam, others do not. Anne Scott has worked with the Naqshbandi Sufi path, a non-Islamic tradition, for 16 years.

Scott was attracted to the basic Sufi idea that love is the essence of God and that only through love can we humans draw closer to God. Followers also seek to resolve the dualities and apparent contradictions of life, believing that unconditional love helps us understand that everything — the good and even what we might consider the bad and the ugly — is a manifestation of the divine.

Scott, 56, through her DreamWeather Foundation, lectures and leads workshops and retreats for women on spirituality in everyday life. She is the author of “Serving Fire: Food for Thought, Body and Soul” (Celestial Arts, 1994) and “The Laughing Baby” (Celestial Arts, 2001). She spoke with me last week by phone from her home in Sebastopol.

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Earlier you told me that your first spiritual experience involved a Buddhist chef, but you didn’t give me any details. Can you tell me more about that?

I was in China on a two-week trip as a photojournalist for Money magazine. I was doing a story on one of the first tour groups to be allowed into the country, and I had asked for vegetarian food, even though I’m not a vegetarian, because I didn’t want to eat the meat and the large quantities of unappetizing food they were serving to the other tourists. This caused a little problem because every place that we went they didn’t seem to know what to do with me, and each time I received a bowl of rice, a plate of cabbage and a bowl of peanuts. Everywhere! But I was so happy to be in China I didn’t care.

On the last few days of the trip, we stayed in a rural inn. Everyone was fed their usual fare, and I expected the same thing — the cabbage, the peanuts and the rice. But just as everyone else was nearly finished, out came a cook with a tray of over a dozen dishes of the most amazing vegetarian food that you have ever seen. It was absolutely beautiful! And there was silence in the room, because everyone was awestruck by the beauty and the reverence of this man as he carried the food and put it on the table.

Then he bowed before me and thanked me for [enabling] him to cook vegetarian food — because it turns out he used to be the head cook in a monastery, a Buddhist monastery — and of course with the Communists in power that was just not allowed and those monasteries were closed. After he left there was so much love in this food, so much love in his preparation that I could barely eat it.

I would think you’d want to dig right in after eating the same thing for two weeks.

Honestly, it was an experience that I had never had before, particularly all the bowing, and I was very uncomfortable — I didn’t know what to say to him. Anyway, that night I went to bed, and I had a dream about the Buddhist cook. I saw him bowing before me, and his bowing evoked something in my heart, and I felt a pain, like a great sorrow, and then — like a movie being repeated — he bowed, and bowed, and bowed again. Each time I felt that pain.

As I told you before, I had no religious or spiritual background before this. I had a few years of church training when I was young, but I had no belief in anything beyond my own mind, basically. But during this night it felt as if my heart had been broken open, and all the protection, all the defenses and all the barriers were melted by this love of this chef. Every time he bowed in my dream, I would again feel this pain — and I was crying and filled with love. I had never known love in that way.

The experience was so beyond the mind that my mind couldn’t wrap around it. And so I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even my husband, for about 10 years, until I began to realize what the experience really was — that it was a spiritual awakening.

You have followed the Naqshbandi Sufi path for 16 years. Can you tell me a bit about the basic beliefs of this tradition?

Like all Sufi paths, it’s a path of love. In Sufism, there is an understanding that this love is in the heart of every human being, only it’s covered over by our conditioning and by the ego and many other aspects that we accumulate during life that might give us a different impression of who we really are. And so the Sufi path helps you to uncover the truth of your own being and this love that’s in the center of your heart. The practices are very simple: meditation and awareness of the presence of the divine.

It’s also described a mystical path. What makes it mystical?

I would describe “mysticism” as a way of making a direct connection to the divine or to what Sufis call the “beloved.” There is no intermediary between you and God.

Many of us find it difficult to make that connection. The Sufi path helps you find it within yourself, often through a deep inner journey and through tremendous longing. I think longing is the stamp of Sufism — the longing in the heart.

What led you to Sufism in the first place?

It started with a book I read during one of the darkest times in my life. I had just taken my husband to the emergency room with a severe asthma attack in 1987, and I didn’t know if he was going to live.

The name of the book was “The Last Barrier: A Journey Into the Essence of Sufi Teachings,” by Reshad Field. It was about a man’s journey to find his spiritual path, which turned out to be Sufism. I had never heard of Sufism before, but I finished the book in about three hours. Afterward, I realized that everything that happened in my life, every seeming failure or sorrow, every difficulty, was not really a mistake. It had all been pointing towards this deeper journey, which I didn’t even know I had. And that was the journey to find the truth in myself — the journey to God.

I had been raised to think that if you weren’t really happy in life, then you were a failure. The Sufi path shows you that life is much bigger than that, and I realized that inside, what I thought was just sorrow, was really the longing for God. Suddenly, my whole life was given context. It’s like walking around with only one leg, and then you are given another leg, and you can stand there with full dignity because you understand yourself better. And you understand there is a purpose to your life that is much deeper than you ever knew.

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En Fi[ni]sterra hay una ermita derruida cuya advocación ha despertado las más diversas teorías, unas con algún acierto y otras sin ningún asidero. Me refiero a la ermita de San Guillermo, erigida en una caverna por los Templarios, tan afectos a reunir reliquias de santos como las de Felipe, Helena, Esteban, Lorenzo, Eufemia y otros que utilizaban tanto para atraer aspirantes como para recibir donaciones.

Se desconoce la fecha del nacimiento de San Guillermo. De los pocos datos de su vida consta que era conde de la ciudad de Toulouse, en Francia, y más tarde fue nombrado duque de Aquitania por el emperador Carlomagno, primo de su abuelo Charles Martel.

Cuando la invasión musulmana a Francia en el año 793, Guillermo organizó la formación de un ejército que, con grandes sacrificios, detuvo a los árabes. No sólo esto, sino que preparó también una contraofensiva. No hubo muchos príncipes y caballeros cristianos que le acompañaran, porque creyeron que las fuerzas limitadas de los cristianos no eran capaces de realizar un ataque a los invasores. Pero él confiaba en la ayuda de Dios y supo animar a sus tropas con tal fervor que los musulmanes tuvieron que retirarse.

En España

Guillermo de Aquitania sirvió más tarde en España y en el 801 cooperó con su ejército en la reconquista de Barcelona. Luego regresó a su patria y se dedicó a reedificar su ducado tras las grandes destrucciones que había dejado la guerra, especialmente en las pequeñas poblaciones y en el campo. Carlomagno le quiso dar a Guillermo otros terrenos en recompensa por su heroica lucha, pero éste le manifestó su intención de entregarse a la vida monástica: «No quiero honores, ya que nada más cumplí con mi deber. Como los árabes han sido definitivamente rechazados de nuestras tierras, quiero ponerme ahora la armadura de Dios». Así es que en el año 806 se retiró a la abadía benedictina de San Salvador de Gellone, etapa en el camino de Santiago, y que él mismo había fundado en el 804.

A este convento se refiere Nomper II, señor de Caumont, Chateauneuf, Château Cullier y de Berbéguières y caballero de la Orden del Santo Sepulcro, cuando visita en 1417 la ermita de San Guillermo y en su Voiatge a Saint Jaques en Compostelle et a Notre Dame de Finibus Terre escribe: «…hay una gran montaña donde está ubicada una ermita que recuerda la de Saint-Guilhem en el valle de Gellone»; hoy Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert en Hérault, Francia. Pero Sebald Rieter afirma en 1462: «…allí yace en el monte (de Fi[ni]sterra) el cuerpo del venerable señor San Guillermo quien hizo allí muchos milagros…».

Templarios

Ahora bien, Nicolas Popplau describe en 1484 un brazo «guarnecido de plata» (robado por una escuadra francesa en 1552) que se conservaba en la iglesia fisterrana; pues en 1151, Raimon, abad de Sant-Guilhem-le-Désert, hizo este regalo a los Templarios de la iglesia de Sante-Eulalie-de-Cernon, al sureste de Millau, principal encomienda de Larzac, Francia.
Más tarde, entre 1154 y 1199, los Templarios traerían consigo la reliquia a Fi[ni]sterra, como lo atestigua uno de los escudos de la iglesia; de tipo cortado y que lleva arriba dos bustos de caballero con sus cascos afrontados (imitando el famoso sello del Temple), y abajo un brazo armado empuñando una espada. Escudo que fue mal atribuido a los Recamán.

San Guillermo murió el 28 de mayo de 812, fue canonizado por el Papa Alejandro II y su festividad es celebrada particularmente en Francia y Alemania.

El ejemplo de Guillermo de Aquitania movió en el tiempo de las cruzadas a muchos nobles europeos a dejar la familia y la patria para luchar y morir en Tierra Santa o España.

by JUAN GABRIEL SATTI BOUZAS in www.lavozdegalicia.es

The Jews believed that God literally dwelt in the Beit Elohim, or House of God, and such houses - what we call temples - were built in Siloh, Bethel, Dan, Gilgal and other towns. But in an effort to concentrate worship and stamp on heresy and paganism, Solomon built the Bait ha-Migdash, “home of the Sanctuary”, which contained the Ark of the Covenant and its two tablets of stone given by God to Moses. Dedicated in 964 bc, it was thereafter regarded as the only legitimate place of sacrificial worship, and the artificial mount on which it was built gave it a high profile.

The original temple, about which we know only from detailed descriptions in the Bible, was smashed up by the Babylonians in 586 bc, restored as the Second Temple 70 years later, looted and desecrated by the Syrians in 169-7 bc, again restored and then completely rebuilt by Herod the Great.

He constructed what was one of the largest and most magnificent buildings in the entire Roman world (of which, be it noted, Jews formed 10 per cent of the population). This vast temple, in turn, was de stroyed by the Romans in ad 70, during the fourth century occupied by Christian cults, seized by the Muslims, who build the Dome of the Rock on it in about ad 700, plus the superb El Aqsa mosque, and then occupied by Crusaders in the 12th century. They produced the Knights Templar, who guarded the site, collected the money donated by pilgrims, became international bankers, and were suppressed by the French for their cash in the 14th century.

Thereafter, Arabs, then Turks, held sway until in 1917 General Allenby destroyed the Turkish army and entered Jerusalem on foot as the humble conqueror. When Israel was founded in 1948, the Arabs held east Jerusalem, which included the Temple Mount, and it was not until the Six Day War in 1967 that the Jews finally got the Temple back.

However, for complex reasons of religious ritual, Jews are not allowed on the Temple Mount itself, being confined to the Wailing Wall at the bottom, and even archaeology (begun in 1967) operates under severe restrictions. So many mysteries remain, not least the whereabouts of the Ark, presumably buried somewhere in the bowels of the Mount.

This complex history, fraught with religious undertones and frissons, has inspired waves of passion for three millennia, and some knowledge of its history is essential to understand the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict today and the intransigence on both sides. That is one reason why Professor Goldhill’s concise account is so useful. However, he has much else to tell us about the way in which the Temple has impinged on our lives.

It was thought, for instance, that the tomb of St Peter’s in Rome had been marked by 12 twisted white marble columns, brought to Rome by Constantine, who had looted them from the Temple. When Bernini came to build the canopy over the high altar of the new St Peter’s in the 17th century, he combined the idea of twisted columns with the great bronze monsters, Jachin and Boaz, which guarded the porch of the Temple, to produce his magnificent Baldacchino.

This captured the imagination of Archbishop Laud and in the 1640s he got his carver Nicholas Stone to make two magnificent twisted columns for the Baroque porch which was added incongruously to the Gothic church of St Mary’s in Oxford. Those infuriated the Puritans at the time (and helped to get Laud executed) and have puzzled visitors ever since.

The Temple also inspired the strange and powerful cult of freemasonry, an 18th-century invention in its modern form and an extraordinary combination of credulous myth and hard-headed mutual self-advancement. Masons argue that King David, the Temple’s inspiration, was the first patron of Masons, and details of the Temple, its measurements and references to Jachin and Boaz, play major roles in Masonic rituals and passwords: “in strength - pass, Boaz” is one of them.

Our Protestant Hanoverian royal family adopted freemasonry in a big way as a protection against Catholicism (George VI was a lifelong Mason) and Catholics, here and in Europe, evolved huge conspiracy theories against what they saw as a vicious secret society, a putative form of international terrorism.

Now the Muslims have taken over, and woven Masonic misdeeds into their skein of anti-Semitism. Their academic “research” has uncovered the “fact” that freemasonry was founded by Jews in the first century ad and was instrumental in creating Communism, Nazism and Zionism, striving “to spread sexual anarchism and moral disintegration”. And, come to think of it, the new American imperialism is the product of masonry too: “a close look at the US dollar bill would reveal the first letter of the word Zion engraved between the two pillars of Boaz and Jikin [sic]“.

In http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Great video by Hugo Almeida you can find on YouTube. Hugo sent as an email with a link to this 4min clip about the Templar castle of Almourol, in  a small island in the middle of the Tagus river, just a few miles from Tomar and we think this is something you should look at. The voice over is in Portuguese, but there are subtitles in English.

Thanks Hugo!

Like most tourists, we came from the wrong direction. The orange-rich plains near Valencia should have lain before us. Instead, we had driven away from the city that morning. A tortuous ascent had led us to Ares, in a forgotten corner of north-east Spain. This was once the the limit of the Christian kingdom, and heroes such as El Cid drew breath here as they contemplated the fruitful lands below.

We left the rich pickings of the coast for the barren splendour of Ares. An imposing Crusader castle once stood proudly over the town. Now it is a one-walled fragment on a precarious limestone sponge. We popped into the Hotel d’Ares, which doubled as the town bar. The owner was paying lip service to five centuries of Moorish rule by serving pistachios.

Looking eastward, past the Gothic arcading of the Templar monastery, past the forbidding steel statue of James, the Conqueror of Aragon, our gazes tumbled 4,000 feet to the plain below.

The Maestrazgo is a tricky place to pin down on the map. Topographically, it represents the last hurrah of the Meseta, the raised upland of central Spain. In times past it denoted the area within the jurisdiction of the Maestre, or the head honcho of those warrior monks who helped expel the Arabic settlers. Armed brotherhoods of farmers had long existed in Spain, but they had acquired a quasi-religious character in emulation of their Moorish neighbours. It was these arms that built the walled towns of the region.

This then was the harsh landscape that El Cid swept through, and the self-same terraced fields we would drive past the next morning. The Cid’s name lingers everywhere, whether in the stubborn pride of the farmers or as a simple appendage to towns such as Villafranca del Cid.

Here you won’t find the gentle groves of Moorish almonds, olives and oranges of just a few miles east. Instead, you are treated to one of the most majestic landscapes in Europe - table-top mountains endlessly repeating to the horizon. The sheer scale of the terraces, the Moors’ greatest legacy to this region, would defy the imagination of the busiest Yorkshire stone-waller.

Though much of Spain’s hinterland still feels like frontier country, this was the frontier’s frontier, a place for hardened men to subdue and move on, leaving others to scratch a living from the unyielding soil. Even today this feeling remains palpable. Settlements are small and huddled into valleys, or brood nervously above rivers. Scattered flocks of dirty Merino sheep, which arrived a millennium ago with their Berber masters, still blend into the bare yellowing grasslands.

Now, apart from nods to a wool-dominated past in towns like Villafranca and Cati, where textiles of all materials are made, the region thrives on pigs.

Our first full day in the car took us north from Ares across one of the most dramatically empty landscapes in Europe, to the precipitous heart of Crusader territory, Cantavieja. The film director Ken Loach was so excited by Cantavieja that he shot Land and Freedom here, his film about the Spanish Civil War. The slightly forlorn town, which perches atop a sheer, three-sided gorge, is slightly forlorn, although its square, with a Tardis-like cathedral, is a jewel.

A network of alleyways led to one of those treasures that guidebooks mention, and yet still retain a “stumbled upon” feel. The Templar church of San Miguel presented us with an opportunity to play the endearing game of “hunt the priest”, with bonus marks for finding the priest’s devoted 80-year-old acolyte, who held the keys.

The chapel, notwithstanding its Ikea-style altar, was a palpable link to the organisation of soldier monks that helped expel the Arabic presence from Spain. Nowhere else had I felt the presence of these white-robed Crusaders so strongly.

Glorious sunshine accompanied us to one of the most perfect villages in Spain. A Unesco-sponsored World Heritage Site, Mirambel was once home to the Templars who, reeling from trumped-up charges of heresy and sodomy, packed up shop and retired to impregnable Cantavieja. They left a heritage to drool over. The Puerta de las Monjas (Nun’s Gate) is emblematic of the beautiful collision of Gothic and Mudejar architecture, and probably the most photographed site in the region. The town’s only hotel, the Fonda Guimera, has been an inn as long as anyone can remember. The slightly forbidding reception (also the town bar) gave way to charming if somewhat sparse accommodation - though their lunchtime paella was excellent.

A little later, several bottles of the local Utiel-Requena white fuelled our stumble around empty but stunningly preserved streets. Almost opposite the hotel, the tiny chapel of Saint Catherine proved to be a treasure trove, unlike the big barn of a church at the other end of town, whose doors were singed by revolutionaries a century and more ago.

Day three led us to Morella, the self-styled capital of this administratively eclectic region. Twenty miles an hour down a half-finished road littered with dinosaur remains took us past the Fabrica Giner, a model industrial village recently converted by the Valencian government into a hotel. One more gravelly bend, and Morella reared up before us. No photo can prepare you for this jaw-dropping moment.

It’s hard to know where the eyes should begin. Crowning the town like a wedding cake, the castle is a thing of wonder. Then there are the walls. Built by the Knights of Montesa (an Aragonese sub-branch of the killer monks), they are punctuated by four gates and 14 majestic towers.

The town itself sits below like a giant pink bib. This particular bib contains magnificent shops. Along the main street hang succulent cured hams, cardigans no granny could knit, sweets drenched in honey and almonds, dark, creaky tapas bars, and exotic alpargatas, hemp shoes made from single lengths of twine.

Above us, where no car could follow, stood the 12th-century basilica of Santa Maria, the most beautiful church in this corner of Spain. An array of saints and virgins ushered us into the gloomy interior, where a marble and mahogany staircase took up the heart of the nave, seemingly leading everywhere but up.

After a day of stair and pavement bashing, we settled into the Cardenal Ram. This well-preserved medieval palace has a somewhat medieval kitchen, but the cordero trufado (truffled lamb) was excellent. We had already discovered that the restaurants of the Maestrazgo seemed to be as much prey to the over-liberal use of olive oil as anywhere in Spain. Vegetables were served reluctantly.

In the morning we motored out of town beneath the imposing bulk of St Matthew’s Gate. A short descent took us to the newly improved N232. As we headed back to the coast, it became clear that no tourists ever branched off the road. A pity, as there were other Templar treats to see before we reached the Hollywood-endorsed town of Peniscola (where they actually shot El Cid) for paella and a swim, before hitting the motorway back to Valencia and another Spain.

Valencia basics

Getting there
British Airways (0845 773 3377; www.ba.com) and Iberia (0845 601 2854; www.iberia.com) flies direct to Valencia from most UK airports. From there it is a train ride to Vinaros and then by bus to Morella. Barcelona is an even cheaper starting point, but entails a three-hour journey from the airport. Unless you are planning to hike on one of the many excellent marked trails, a car is essential. Flights and car hire can be booked through Magic of Spain (0870 888 0222; www.magictravelgroup.co.uk).

Hotels can be booked on various websites, including www.maestrazgo.org and www.turismomaestrazgo.com, but the information is not always up-to-date. Two options are the two-star Fonda Guimera, Mirambel (0034 964 178269), or the three-star Cardenal Ram, Morella (964 173085). The Palacio Osset Miro, Forcall (964 177524), is a beautifully converted palace in a somewhat down-at-heel town eight miles north of Morella, or there’s Hotel d’Ares, Ares del Mestre (964 443007). Morella makes a perfect day trip for sun worshippers on the Costa del Azahar; in winter it’s cold at 3,000ft plus, and most hotels close down, leaving a tourist-free spring and autumn.

By Adrian Woodford in http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Practically every major city in America has a Masonic temple, often a grand structure featuring an ornate stone facade, towering columns and a sprawling interior. However, exactly what goes on behind closed doors remains a mystery to most outsiders. The Freemasons, an international fraternal organization, are known for keeping their activities secret.

For centuries, that penchant for secrecy has fueled countless conspiracy theories — Masons have been accused of everything from plotting world domination to acting as an agent of the pope. In recent years, the novelist Dan Brown has drawn heavily on Masonic lore and symbolism in his best-selling novels “Angels and Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code.”

Although the organization maintains no particular religious affiliation, its largely aging male membership — there are a few women, too — does espouse certain ideals of a metaphysical nature. Masons live by a moral code that emphasizes charity and community service.

Dustin Erwin, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of San Francisco, is a member of the Freemasons in San Francisco. I interviewed him by e-mail last week.

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Why did you decide to join the Freemasons?
I joined for a number of reasons. For one, I’ve always been interested in “secretive” societies. Even though Freemasons are adamant that they are not a “secret society” but rather a “society with secrets,” it still had that mysterious attraction. I also have an interest in European/Christian/early American history, and the history of the Freemasons is absolutely fascinating.

Secondly, I was raised in a suburban, Protestant household. So I’ve had a fair amount of exposure to Christianity. But as I got older, went to college, began studying philosophy and other religions, I took issue with the “my way is right, your way is wrong” mentality that many of the Christians I was raised around had. I wouldn’t say I was ever an atheist, but I was a hard-core agnostic.

I wanted a way to get closer to God. I wanted some rational spiritual structure and guidelines. Freemasonry turned out to be exactly this — a system of morality. In fact, one of their mottos is “We make good men better.”

Tell me more about the Freemasons’ idea of morality. What are the main ideas?

It’s a very simple concept: Masons seek to improve themselves and help others not only because it’s the right thing to do but also because we want to do it. All of the major religions share some variation of this same idea, and that is part of the reason why Freemasonry is so welcoming of people from different backgrounds. It really all boils down to this simple theme.

So you don’t have to be part of a particular religion to join?

A Freemason can be of any faith. The only requisite is that he believe in a supreme being (whom they diplomatically refer to as “The Great Architect of the Universe”).

Why did you think that Freemasonry would help you “get closer to God,” as you put it earlier?

I feel like being righteous is about much, much more than simply believing and praying; it’s about your actions. I liked the fact that Freemasonry reinforced the idea that one’s actions are as important as one’s faith or intentions. In this way, I felt it might help put me on the right track in being closer to God.

I want to point out that I’m not on a high horse or preaching or trying to tell you all how good I am. I’m very, very far from perfect, and I’m still very far from where I want to be. But you have to figure out which direction you’re walking before you can take that first step, and I feel like Freemasonry is the compass in this sense.

Was it difficult to become a member? Did they make you jump through a lot of hoops?

Joining was not that difficult. It’s a rather long story, but I’ll summarize by saying that a Mason friend took me to a lodge dinner where he introduced me to several members. I filled out an application signed by two sponsors, paid my application fee and waited for a couple of months. Then I was contacted by three Masons individually, who asked if they could come to my apartment to interview me.

What did they want to know?

It was less intimidating than you might think. They asked questions like, What did I hope to get out of Masonry? What do I do [for a living]? Had I ever been arrested? And then there was some basic small talk. I think they were just trying to get a sense of what kind of person I am.

The Freemasons are known for their unusual initiation rituals, although exactly what goes on is kept secret. What can you tell me about them?

The initiation is essentially a drama that begins to reveal and explain the symbolism and ritual of Masonry. It was a little strange in that it was very old and completely foreign to me. I’ve never been a joiner — I was never in a college fraternity or anything.

There is no tomfoolery involved, and it’s meant to be a very solemn event. It turned out to be a very intriguing and memorable experience.

Was the process upsetting or scary?

It definitely wasn’t upsetting. And I wouldn’t quite call it scary either. I was out of my element, for sure, which made it slightly uncomfortable. I really didn’t know what to expect, but it turned out to be completely benign — there was no hazing involved.

Tell me about your lodge. How often do you meet?

There are lodge events nearly every week. As an entered apprentice, a sort of entry-level Mason, I am not permitted to attend all of the events — so far I’ve only been to dinners. Like I said, I’m very new to this.

What happens at meetings?

Some nights they do “degree work,” where a Mason is promoted to a higher level, and some nights are strictly social functions. There is a large social component to being a Freemason. You have to realize that many members are retired, and this is their primary social outlet. However, I have noticed that many of the new members are younger (in their 20s), and I’ve read that there are more younger people joining.

Is it true that you have a secret handshake?

There are a few handshakes.

I’m sure you’re aware that Freemasonry has been linked to numerous conspiracy theories over the centuries. It’s been described in some circles as an occult and even an evil power. What do you make of these claims?

I really can’t answer this question for fear of my life — just kidding! For the most part, I find these claims to be ridiculous. If you were to walk into the lodge on any given night, you’d find a bunch of good-natured older guys playing billiards and telling unfunny jokes. It’s not like there is a dark-robed master sacrificing goats by candlelight or anything.

I think most conspiracy theories stem from the unknown. For example, we don’t know who killed JFK, and therefore there are countless conspiracy theories about who did it. Most people are uninformed or misinformed about Freemasonry, and I think this is the cause of a lot of it. From what I’ve seen, the Masons are about as harmless as the Girl Scouts.

The group has also been seen by some religious leaders, particularly the Catholic Church, as a threat to their beliefs.

I honestly don’t understand why certain religious leaders condemn Freemasonry. I suspect it’s mostly influenced by power and paranoia.

Like I said, I was raised Christian — Sunday school, Bible camp, the whole nine yards. And everything I know about Freemasonry is completely compatible with Christianity and has really provided me with a way to implement those principles into my life.

What do your friends think about your joining the Freemasons?

It’s quite funny to try to explain it to them. They’re like, “Isn’t that some sort of satanic cult?” It can be tough, especially in San Francisco. I don’t come across a lot of people my age wanting to talk about God, religion or righteousness. When I’ve tried to bring these things up at bars or parties, the conversation tends to die, although I think that is changing.

I think a lot of younger people are getting tired of our increasingly materialistic and shallow culture, and are looking for something more traditional. I know that was part of the appeal for me. You can only hang out in bars and go to shows for so long. I felt like I needed something more relevant and lasting.

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By David Ian Miller

During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area writer and editor David Ian Miller has worked as a city hall reporter, personal finance writer, cable television executive and managing editor of a technology news site. His writing credits include Salon.com, Wired News and The New York Observer.

His “Finding My religion” series of interviews that you can find in SFGate.com look at individual experience of how different people found their religion. It is considered that this is a subject close to all Templars heart, that will surely resonate with some of our own individual experiences, helping us understand how mystical traditions far apart from ours have so many common points. You will also read about people that today follow mystical disciplines that it is said the historical Templar Order was familiar with, including Sufism, Kaballah, Gnosticism, Sacred Geometry, Meditation, etc.

 Photos of the Grand Lodge of New York and Temple - Luis de Matos (c) 2007

There cannot be many more forbidding places of worship than the Convento de Cristo at Tomar, 80 miles north of Lisbon. Built as a fortress as well as a monastery, it stands menacingly above the town, its gloomy yellow walls piled on mournful grey ramparts. Your first instinct, on reaching the end of the winding road up to it, is to jump back in your hire car and return to the duel-to-the-death known as Portugal’s A1 motorway.

But if you press on through the outer keep, something extraordinary happens. Rounding a corner, you come upon a pair of tall gates that opens onto a garden of other-worldly serenity. Delicately sculpted hedges border the path; a snatch of birdsong pierces the hum of traffic from the streets below; exotic blooms stretch inquisitively from the flowerbeds; elaborately tiled benches command an orchard of orange trees. Spring, it seems, has come to the giant’s garden after all.

At the far end, a balustraded terrace leads to the extraordinary Romanesque building known as the Charola. On the inside, this shares the circular ground plan of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the spiritual home of the Knights Templar. On the outside - buttressed, castellated, and 16-sided [inside there's a 8 sided towered church] - it resembles a decapitated Dalek.

The Templars were the special forces of Christendom - fierce warrior monks who enjoyed a good massacre. They played a leading role in driving the Moors from this part of Portugal, and when their Grand Master Gualdim Pais began building here in 1160, he created a monument to their pursuit of war and spiritual peace. The knights, it is said, rode their horses not only to church, but into church.

As it grew to its present enormous size, the monastery developed an ever more extreme multiple-personality disorder. Between the 12th and 19th century - when Portugal’s religious orders were abolished, and the monks evicted - it went through seven distinct stages of development, and its architecture ranges from sublime simplicity to Versace-esque extravagance.

Inside the main building, it is the simple you meet first. Although originally used for funerals, the Gothic-arched Cemetery Cloister seems too jolly by half to deserve its name: a lavender bush blooms in the middle, the walls are adorned with intricate blue azulejos (the decorative painted tiles which the Portuguese pirated from their Moorish enemies), and the most potent symbol of mortality you will find is a single fallen orange, glowing beside a dark puddle. In the adjoining Washing Cloister, where the monks’ habits were once laundered, the water troughs have been turned into flowerbeds - a small triumph of soil over detergent.

Both cloisters were built under Henry the Navigator, the 15th-century prince who transformed Portugal into a major seafaring nation. The ensuing enthusiasm for anything to do with boats can be seen in the famous Chapter House window, ingeniously carved with the anchor chains, twists of rope, and other maritime motifs which characterise the Manueline style of Gothic architecture. Green with moss, the window looks like a seaweed-smothered wreck freshly hauled from the ocean bed.

But if you think this is over the top, it is nothing compared to the inside of the Charola. Under a high ceiling stands a two-storey octagon - its pillars and arches smothered with Byzantine patterns of painted gold - looking like a huge ecclesiastical desk-tidy for the monk who has everything. There are murals and painted panels above, behind and before you; there are corbels bearing painted statues of bearded prophets, sallow friars and anaemic archbishops; there are more gilded carvings than you could shake an episcopal crook at. You can almost hear the Grand Master and his architect egging each other on: “Is there anything we’ve left out? Couldn’t we squeeze in just one more angel?” The monastery’s comparatively austere Main Cloister is considered one of the greatest examples of Renaissance architecture in Portugal, brimming with splendid arches and ingenious spiral staircases. The real treat, though, is to escape down the long, beautifully ascetic corridors off it - a symphony of red-brick floors, half-tiled white walls, and barrel-vaulted ceilings leading past the monks’ abandoned cells.

At this point, the place frankly becomes a bit of a maze, and if you have children you would be wise not to let them out of your sight, or you may never see them again. But it is worth persevering in the search for the magical Sala do Capitulo - another chapter house - on the ground floor. Never finished, it has capitulated to the elements, and stands open to the sky with a lawn for a nave and two pigeons for sacristans, solemnly cooing their vespers under the ruined arches.

The advantage of visiting the monastery off season is that you can experience the kind of moment that crowds make impossible. Mine came when, standing in the empty Philippine Sacristy, I suddenly caught the sound of distant singing: a high, exquisite voice glorying in a medieval carol. Baffled, and half expecting to meet the ghost of a dismembered chorister, I followed it to the heart of the monastery, where I found a boiler-suited young woman halfway up a scaffolding in the Charola, serenading herself as she dabbed at one of the murals. I didn’t interrupt, but stood there transfixed for several minutes, watching the sunlight steal through the stained-glass windows of the church, and listening to a song the Templars might have sung 800 years before.

Glorious religious relics in Portugal
Two other magnificent monasteries lie within easy reach of Tomar. The Mosteiro de Batalha, 25 miles to the west, is a Gothic extravaganza built by King Joao I after the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385 (facing 30,000 Castilians with only 6,500 men, he promised to dedicate a great abbey to the Virgin if he won). Joao is buried in the star-vaulted Founder’s Chapel beside his English queen, Philippa of Lancaster, the daughter of John of Gaunt.

Outside, the church is a riot of pinnacles and flying buttresses; inside, its high and narrow nave is flanked by such immense pillars that you might be walking through a stone forest. The breathtaking Cloister of King Joao I first defined Manueline architecture with its elaborate tracery, while the Unfinished Chapels - still roofless 500 years after they were commissioned - are a poignant testament to thwarted human endeavour.

Twelve miles south of Batalha is Alcobaça, whose monastery commemorates another victory - this one over the Moors at Santarem in 1147. The Cistercians based the design partly on their abbey at Clairvaux, and the church - the largest in Portugal - has a wonderful austerity. It contains the tombs of Pedro I and his wife Ines de Castro, who was murdered on her father-in-law’s orders; on becoming king, Pedro - maddened by grief - tore out and ate the killers’ hearts, and made his courtiers kiss the hand of Ines’s exhumed body.

The monks of Alcobaça were famously greedy (though they probably stopped short of cannibalism) and two of the most remarkable areas are the kitchen and the refectory - a graceful vaulted room with a colonnaded staircase. The kitchen contains an awe-inspiring tiled indoor chimney, over 70 feet high, and two marble tables, each large enough to hold an ox.

Portugal basics

Getting there
British Airways (0845 773 3377; www.ba.com) has daily scheduled services from Gatwick to Lisbon (flights operated by GB Airways).

If you are using Lisbon as a base, the Hotel Avenida Palace (00351 21 342 6135) is a central, old-style hotel. Leiria is a convenient town for visiting all three monasteries, as is Fatima.

Further information
The Portuguese National Tourist Office, 2nd Floor, 22-25A Sackville Street, London W1S 3LY (0906 364 0610).

By Anthony Gardner in http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Photos by Luis de Matos (c) 2007

It’s one of Minnesota’s greatest mysteries. It’s something that puts settlers in America well before Columbus. A Minnesota geologist thinks the controversial Kensington Runestone is the real thing and there is evidence that he says backs up the theory.

The Kensington Runestone is a rock found near Alexandria a century ago. It’s inscription speaking of Norwegians here in 1362. It begs the question. Were Vikings exploring our land more than 100 years before Columbus? Or is it just an elaborate hoax?

New research shows that the stone is genuine and there’s hidden code that may prove it. It contains carved words that have haunted these hills and the Ohman family for more than 100 years, yet their faith has never wavered.

“I just never had any doubt. I mean I was very emphatic about it. Absolutely it’s real. There’s no doubt,” said Darwin Ohman. His grandfather found the Runestone.

Darwin’s grandfather Olof Ohman has been considered the author of Minnesota’s most famous fraud, the Runestone. He says he found it buried under a tree in 1898. Critics say the language on the stone is too modern to be from 1362, that some of the runes are made up. They say this simple farmer carved it himself to fool the learned.

“You’re calling him a liar. If this is a hoax he lied to his two sons, he lied to his family, lied to his neighbors and friends and lied to the world,” said Scott Wolter a geologist and researcher of the Runestone.

Wolter and Texas engineer Dick Nielsen are sharing for the first time new evidence about the hidden secrets they say are carved in this stone.

“It changes history in a big way,” Wolter said

In 2000 he performed one of the very few geological studies on the stone. He says the breakdown of minerals in the inscription shows the carving is at least 200 years old, older than Olof Ohman. Those findings support the first geological study in 1910 that also found the stone to be genuine.

“In my mind the geology settled it once and for all,” he said.

Linguistic experts are not convinced. They say runes like those on the stone are made up. But Nielsen has now found the same one here in an old Swedish rune document dating back to the 1300’s.

“It makes me ask the question if they were wrong about that what else were they wrong about?” Wolter said.

For the first time Wolter has documented every individual rune on the stone with a microscope. He started finding things that he didn’t expect. He was the first to discover dots inside four R shaped runes on the stone. He said they are intentional and they mean something. So Wolter and Nielsen scoured rune catalogs.

“We found the dotted R’s. It’s an extremely rare rune that only appeared during medieval times. This absolutely fingerprints it to the 14th century. This is linguistic proof. This is medieval, period,” Wolter said.

They traced the dotted ‘R’ to rune covered graves inside ancient churches on the island of Gotland off the coast of Sweden. What they found on the grave slabs were very interesting crosses. They were Templar crosses, the symbol of a religious order of knights formed during the crusades and persecuted by the Catholic Church in the 1300’s.

“This was the genesis of their secret societies, secret codes, secret symbols, secret signs all this stuff. If they carved the rune stone why did they come here and why did they carve this thing?” Wolter asked.

He has uncovered new evidence that has taken his research in a very different direction. Wolter now believes that the words on the stone may not be the record of the death of 10 men but instead, a secret code concealing the true purpose of the rune stone.

Two runes in the form of an L and a U are two more reasons why linguists say Olof Ohman carved the stone. They are crossed and linguists say they should not be.

A third rune has a punch at the end of one line. Each rune on the stone has a numerical value. Wolter and Nielsen took the three marked runes and plotted them on a medieval dating system called the Easter Table.

“When we plotted these three things we got a year, 1362. It was like ‘oh my god is this an accident? Is this a coincidence?’ I don’t think so,” Wolter said.

They wondered why Templars would come to North America, carve the stone and code the date.

“If it’s the Templars that were under religious persecution at the time, that would be a pretty good reason to come over here,” Wolter figured.

“I’m sure a lot of people are going to roll their eyes and say oh it’s the Davinci Code and if they do they do. This is the evidence. This is who was there. This is what the grave slabs tell us. It is what it is,” he said.

Wolter and Nielsen’s authored the book “The Kensington Runestone: Compelling New Evidence.” Wolter is currently writing another book on the Runestone.

By Ben Tracy in CBS WCCO

See the video report: HERE

FASCINATING as it is to visit historic houses that have been continuously inhabited by one family since they were built, it is equally interesting to find a venerable building that has not been so privileged and protected.

St Mary’s House at Bramber in is just such a place: constructed by Bishop Waynflete in 1470, it has weathered periods of dereliction, division and habitation by monks, farmers, MPs, Oscar Wilde characters, soldiers and even cattle, and has probably never looked more beautiful than it does today - a tribute to the present occupants, Peter Thorogood and Roger Linton.

The house presents a classic half-timbered Wealden façade. It is listed Grade I, not only for its exterior but also for interior features, which include a panelled room with Elizabethan trompe l’oeil painting and medieval shuttered windows, which lacked glass but coped with the vagaries of the weather through a system of triple-hinged wooden panels.

St Mary’s original occupants were monks, who provided hospitality for pilgrims walking the South Downs Way to Canterbury. The monks were also guardians of the Great Bridge of Bramber and its integral chapel. What is now the village street was then a wharf on the estuary of the River Adur. The present garden wall is built of local winklestone recycled from the medieval wharf and set with plaques commemorating former owners of the house.

Foremost among them is its builder, Bishop William Waynflete of Winchester, Lord High Chancellor of England, first Provost of Eton and founder of Magdalen College, Oxford. Although his original entrance door has been replaced, a section of its arch survives, carved with his mitre and a Plantagenet rose.

The great bridge, which stood until the 17th century, was not the first on the site. Bramber was fortified by William de Braose soon after the Norman conquest - his ruined castle can still be visited - and a wooden bridge then spanned the river.

In 1125 the site of St Mary’s was given to the Knights Templar, who used the port of Bramber as an embarkation point for the Holy Land and built the first chapter house; its hearth, of clay tiles, was discovered in 1990 under one of the floors in St Mary’s. When the Templars moved to Sompting, the property passed to the Priory of Sele and later to Bishop Waynflete.

The bishop, in turn, bequeathed his estate to Magdalen College, which leased out St Mary’s for the next 300 years - mainly to members of Parliament for the thoroughly rotten borough of Bramber. (Until the Reform Act of 1832, the constituency, of fewer than 100 inhabitants, returned two MPs.) Notable among them was the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, who apparently passed through his constituency only once, quite by accident, and asked the post boy where he was. “Bramber?” he exclaimed in surprise. “Why, that’s the place I’m member for!”

Some earlier MPs had felt they should at least pretend to reside in their constituency, so St Mary’s was enriched with embossed and gilded leather wall-coverings, oak panelling and elaborate marquetry fireplaces.

The first floor’s Painted Room is unique in England today; only one other interior at all like it survives, in Essex. Although similarly painted in crude trompe l’oeil panels with land and sea views at their centres, the Essex painting is on canvas, whereas St Mary’s is on wood.

The room was possibly, or even probably, decorated for the visit of Elizabeth I during her progress through Sussex in 1585. Claims that “Elizabeth slept here” have become something of a joke because there are so many of them; but the parsimonious queen really did make so many progresses that she must have stayed in dozens of houses.

Similarly with Charles II and the many hiding places he used during his flight into exile. St Mary’s has a King’s Room, believed to be his last sleeping-place before he embarked for France from nearby Shoreham.

By 1841, St Mary’s was divided in two, with half of the building used as a cattle shed. Its renaissance began with the tenancy of prosperous Farmer Hudson, whose photograph, taken about 1860, shows him with his wife, Harriet, beside the front door. They and many of their 11 children lie in Bramber churchyard.

The Hudsons would probably have approved of their successor, Captain Ashmore of the Irish Royal Fusiliers, because he came to St Mary’s after a spell in an Episcopalian community in Iowa, where he pioneered organic farming. But they would doubtless have tut-tutted over the next occupants for precisely the same reasons that Oscar Wilde was attracted to them: the Hon Algernon Bourke was the pleasure-loving second son of the Earl of Mayo and cousin to the Marquess of Queensberry. He and his fashionable wife, Gwendolen, inspired Wilde’s frivolous characters of the same names in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Alfred Musgrave, who succeeded the Bourkes, filled the house with sumptuous furnishings, including Louis XV gilt suites and early Flemish tapestries. Then the Second World War brought dereliction to the property - not from enemy bombing but from “friendly” occupation by the Royal Canadian Artillery.

In 1944 the house was rescued by Dorothy Ellis and she gallantly struggled to restore and maintain it, by breeding spaniels, dealing in antiques, taking in paying guests and selling off land and portions of the house. Eventually, in 1979, she was forced to sell. For the next four years St Mary’s was filled with butterflies - the collection of a lepidopterist, Paul Smart - until he, too, had to sell.

St Mary’s needed another rescuer, and happily found two: the author and composer Peter Thorogood and the artist-designer Roger Linton, who moved into the house in 1984. Inspired by several historical family connections, Peter and Roger have since devoted their lives to the house.

Land sold by Ellis has been bought back. Algernon Bourke’s Music Room, with the addition of a charming octagonal ante-room designed and built by Roger, is once more the scene of concerts, poetry evenings and parties. The garden makes an idyllic summer setting for Shakespeare productions.

A charitable trust has been formed and a bid for National Lottery money is under way. If successful, the funds will be used to restore areas of the garden, uncover medieval murals in the King’s Room and buy back a section of the house currently divided into flats. But there is already more than enough to entertain visitors on the special open days arranged for Planet readers next weekend. Taking St Mary’s into the realms of time travel, you can even see the marks of blue paint made by Dr Who’s Tardis during the shooting of Silver Nemesis.

St Mary’s (01903 816205) is in the centre of Bramber, West Sussex, which is off the A283, three miles from the A27 junction and 10 miles west of Brighton. The special open days for Planet readers will be held next Saturday and Sunday (January 24 and 25) between 10am and 4pm.

In http://www.telegraph.co.uk

In his breezily comic novel A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, Mark Twain pokes fun briefly at the cult of the Holy Grail. “The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several-years’ cruise. Every year expeditions went out holy Grailing and next year relief expeditions went to hunt for them. There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money.”

The satire seems gentle enough, but this, at the time when Twain was writing (1889), was already verging on the Victorian equivalent of The Life of Brian. For few subjects had captured the imaginations of poets, artists and composers as strongly as the Grail Quest and its associated Arthurian legends. Wagner was obsessed with it, and Pre-Raphaelite painters lovingly depicted the radiant visions experienced by their androgynous Sir Galahads. Victorian spirituality had seized greedily on a body of myths which, unlike the mythology of Greece and Rome, had an indisputably Christian message at its core: the search for the original cup or dish used by Christ at the Last Supper was a powerful symbol of humankind’s quest for spiritual perfection.

From the hotbed of late 19th-century medievalism, however, some much stranger growths emerged. Members of the “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” (a group which included Yeats) tried to revive the practices of medieval magic and alchemy, and became convinced that if only they could penetrate the secrets of the Grail romances, alchemical treatises, Tarot cards and suchlike, they would become the possessors of a hidden higher truth, a secret doctrine which had been passed down by adepts throughout the ages.

Since then, bizarre theories have proliferated: that the Grail story related to a particular place in Persia, that it was a version of Jewish ritual, or (most famously, given the use made of this theory by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land) that it was a remnant of an ancient fertility cult. Others have argued, on the slenderest of evidence, that it was bound up with either the Templars or that other standby of medievalist conspiracy theories, the heretical Cathars.

One best-selling modern book even claims, preposterously, that the true secret of the Grail was the “holy blood”, the blood-line of biological descendants of Jesus Christ. Enter any big bookshop, go to the section marked “mysticism” (this sort of thing does sorely test the descriptive powers of bookshop employees), and you will find shelves full of this stuff. Aspiring authors are, in Mark Twain’s words, “taking a flier” at the Holy Grail all the time - and, contrary to Twain’s remark, finding that there is really quite a lot of money in it.

Anyone who has more than a fleeting interest in this subject must often have longed for a rational and reliable account of the whole Grail phenomenon - one that would set out the known facts of when and where these stories appeared, and test the theories against the evidence. This is not an easy task; it requires not just a good grounding in medieval literature and history, but also certain mental or moral virtues - the ability to deal patiently but firmly with the intellectual equivalent of time-wasters. But Richard Barber, who possesses both the medievalist expertise and the requisite calmness and clarity of thought, has managed it at last, and has produced a really valuable and fascinating book.

As Barber clearly demonstrates, the Grail stories were the product not of immemorial legend, folklore or secret cults, but of individual authors: Chrétien de Troyes (who started the whole fashion), Robert de Boron, Wolfram von Eschenbach and some others. They were writing romances, similar to the other (non-Arthurian) romances they also produced, and subject to the same conventions; so, for example, when they claimed that their story was derived from a previous “book” by a mysterious author, this was just a standard fictional device.

In most of these early texts the “secret” of the Grail is, as Barber points out, a secret withheld only from characters in the story (above all, Parsifal, who fails to ask the essential question about it); nothing special is hidden from the reader. These romances do have a theological message, about the veneration of the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ (the Grail is first described as a dish holding a communion wafer, and is later identified with the cup that held some of Christ’s blood at or after the Crucifixion); but it is a message openly proclaimed in the text. Far from being coded presentations of Cathar heresies or pagan nature-cults, the romances are, as Barber puts it, “quintessentially orthodox in their presentation of the Christian faith”.

One popular theory attributes a purely Celtic origin to the Grail stories, arguing that Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval (the first text, dating from the 1180s) was inspired by an earlier Welsh poem called Peredur; it is also claimed that the Grail itself originated in the “magic cauldrons” of Celtic mythology. Barber argues convincingly that Peredur is a later imitation, not a predecessor, and politely points out the difference between a communion dish or a chalice and a cooking-pot.

He also describes some of the contemporary factors that must have stimulated interest in the idea of the Grail: the cult of relics (stimulated by the grotesque looting of Byzantine relics during the Fourth Crusade), and the new trends in the liturgy of the Mass. His only notable error comes when he states that in the Catholic Mass both bread and wine are given to the congregation. In fact communion under both kinds was common in the earlier Middle Ages, but the reserving of the wine for the priesthood only was a change that was under way in the period he discusses; this fact would surely have been relevant to his story, as it supplies a further motive for his orthodox romance-writers to promote the veneration - at a distance - of the chalice.

Not only has Richard Barber dealt skilfully with the original medieval evidence; he has also traced the long after-life of the Grail legend, above all in its various 19th- and 20th-century avatars. This not only gives him the chance to investigate some modern literary history (Charles Williams, John Cowper Powys, et al); it also enables him to take a properly historical attitude to the various “loony tunes” modern theories, by setting them in their own historical context.

Overall, then, this is the most reassuringly sane of all modern writings on the whole “Holy Grail” phenomenon. One finishes the book just wishing there were more works like it. Anyone for Nostradamus?

 ____________________________

Book details
The Holy Grail: The History of a Legend
By Richard Barber
480 pages; £6.49.
Buy it on the Templar Globe Store

For centuries, the study of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism, was considered off-limits to anyone but the most mature scholars. Some believed you could go crazy if you weren’t ready to take its powerful truths about the nature of God and reality.

That was, of course, before a wave of Hollywood stars became entranced with the teachings of esoteric Judaism. Now, it seems, anyone can study Kabbalah, even Madonna and Britney Spears.

Noted Kabbalah scholar Daniel Matt was 19 when he read his first few lines of the Zohar, the ancient text that is the foundation for Kabbalah. He’s been fascinated by it ever since and is now one of the world’s leading Zohar translators.

Matt, 54, spent more than 20 years as a professor, most recently at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, and is the author of “Zohar: The Book of Enlightenment,” “The Essential Kabbalah” and other popular guides to Jewish mysticism. He is working full time on the first complete English translation of the Zohar based on the original Aramaic text.

Matt recently finished the third of volume of that translation, “The Zohar: Pritzker Edition” (Stanford University Press). The three volumes are available now.

_____________________________________________________

I understand there’s some controversy about when the Zohar, the ancient text that you are translating, was actually written. Can you tell me about that?

Traditional Kabbalists believe that it dates back to early rabbinic times, to the second century, because the main figure in the Zohar is a rabbi who lived then, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai. But most scholars think it was actually composed 1,100 years later in Spain in the 13th century. And there is strong evidence for that.

What kind of evidence?

Well, the Aramaic itself is very strange. There are invented words, and occasionally there is a Spanish term or references to medieval events or personalities. So if you look at it objectively, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is a medieval creation.

Assuming it was written in the 13th century, why would someone be interested in reading the Zohar today? What is its relevance?

The Zohar is written as a commentary on the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, beginning with Genesis. It challenges that text constantly and overturns many traditional teachings. In that sense, you could say that it reimagines Judaism.

In what ways does it rethink Judaism?

For one thing, it challenges the traditional notion of God. It says that none of our usual names for God are adequate. They all fail to capture God’s true nature. The only name that really is correct is the name Ein Sof, which in Hebrew literally means “there is no end,” or the infinite.

So in the Zohar, God is infinity?

Yes. And any picture we have of God, any theological formulation, is really inaccurate and misleading because it doesn’t do justice to the open-endedness of God.

At the same time, the Zohar also says, “If you are going to describe God, you have to balance the masculine with the feminine.” So I think one of its most important contributions is to insist that God is equally male and female. And it does that very graphically. It actually refers to masculine and feminine halves of God, and the goal of religion — the goal of life — is to unite these two halves of God. And how do you do that? By acting ethically and spiritually in the world.

Besides being a commentary on the Bible, the Zohar is also a sort of mystical novel about a group of wandering rabbis. How does that story unfold?

It is a very loose narrative structure, but these rabbis are wandering through Galilee and sharing their mystical secrets with each other. They also run into strange characters on the road who puzzle them. Often, these people seem to be total idiots — for example, a wandering donkey driver or a little child who stumps the rabbis with questions. But it turns out these figures who seem to be fools end up having the greatest wisdom. So part of its message is, you know, you can’t tell where you’ll find teaching, where you’ll find insights.

Traditionally, studying Kabbalah was something you weren’t supposed to do unless you were an older man — I think the cutoff was 40 years old. What was the reason for such restrictions?

There were several reasons. One had to do with an awareness of the power of these mystical teachings. If you lose a sense of yourself and feel that you are melting into the divine — a common experience among students of mysticism — there is a danger you won’t be able to function in the world. You could lose your sanity or be unable to provide for your family or contribute to society.

There’s also the fear that if people really felt that they could contact God on their own terms, then what need would there be for the rabbinic authorities and for the structures of Jewish law? So there is a social danger as well as a psychological one.

Today, it seems like everybody’s studying Kabbalah. Thanks to Madonna and Britney Spears, Jewish mysticism has become chic. What do you make of that trend?

I’m intrigued by it. I think it has, you know, positive and negative aspects. The question I’m often asked, and I wonder myself is, “What about Kabbalah appeals to Hollywood types or to modern Americans?” There are a couple of things I’ve been able to identify.

One is that Kabbalah is a kind of spirituality that doesn’t demand that you flee from the material world. Rather, it says that spiritual seekers should try to transform the world by engaging it. So I think many Westerners who are obviously hungry for the spiritual but aren’t willing to give up the material realm might find that appealing.

Another reason for Kabbalah’s appeal may be that it is an interesting combination of something very strange and exotic but at the same time familiar. What I mean is that the Kabbalah is based on the Bible - the foundational text of Western civilization — and yet it reinterprets it in a radical way.

Is the Kabbalah that you are studying the same one that Madonna and others are studying?

Well, one thing we have to make clear is that there is no book called the Kabbalah. So when people say they are studying the Kabbalah, it could be thousands of texts. That said, the Zohar is the major text of the Kabbalah. Every Jewish thinker would agree with that.

So what’s being taught and promoted by the Kabbalah Learning Center — now they are called the Kabbalah Center [where Madonna goes] — is the Zohar. This is the same Zohar that I’m working on, although they have their own translation, which is based on a Hebrew translation of the original Aramaic.

Let’s talk about your own spiritual background. Did you grow up in a religious family?

Yeah. My father was a Conservative rabbi on the East Coast. I would say God and religion were central in the home, and that the Shabbat [the Jewish Sabbath] was a core part of that. There was a lot of studying and singing and guests and taking walks with my father on Shabbat afternoons.

Did you consider becoming a rabbi yourself?

I considered it, but I was keenly aware of my father’s frustration — he was a very genuine spiritual teacher and demanded a lot of his congregation. And I saw him suffer because of that, not to mention that he was often out in the evening at meetings. I remember once telling him, “I can’t be a rabbi.” And he said, “I didn’t expect you to be.”

Eventually, I decided to teach spiritually but outside the congregational framework and without the rabbinical title. So I went the academic route, and I got a doctorate in Jewish studies. For my doctorate I edited the first translation ever done of the Zohar, which was [from Aramaic] into Hebrew in the 14th century. People say that what you work on in your doctorate often determines what you will do later in life. I didn’t realize that it would determine it so much.

I read in a magazine article that you begin each day by meditating on a few lines of the Zohar after taking a walk up the hillside near your home in Berkeley. Do you still do that?

Yeah. Now I have a more strenuous walk in the morning. I find that if I do a good walk, then I can sit for most of the day without taking a break.

How much a part of your spiritual life is the Kabbalah? It seems like it’s more than just an academic interest for you.

I really try to combine an academic and a spiritual approach. I think you lose some of the richness of the Zohar if you look at it only academically — certainly because it is a spiritual text, and it grew out of spiritual experience. The person writing it is really striving to contact the divine through Scripture, through plumbing the depths of Scripture, trying to discover the divine light hidden in the letters or hinted at by the verses of the Bible.

On the other hand, you lose something, too, I think, if you don’t understand when it was written and who composed it. The person writing the Zohar is trying to present it as something ancient, but he knows what he is doing, and when he talks about hidden levels of meaning, part of the hiddenness is his own project of creating the Zohar. His own creativity is part of what’s going on. It really is an experiment in fiction, a medieval experiment in fiction. And that’s part of its wonder, too.

What is it like to be alone with this mystical material day in and day out? How do you keep your perspective?

I don’t really feel alone. I have one research assistant. Right now, that’s an Israeli in Australia. I’m also in touch with colleagues all around the country, and in Jerusalem, who are involved in Kabbalah or in Zohar specifically.

Fortunately, my wife works at home — she’s involved in spiritual counseling. Our daughter is a senior in college now, but our son is still in high school, and it’s precious to me to take him in the morning to his car pool and to pick him up. So I have that feeling of structure for the day, and then in between, you know, from 8 to 3, I try to immerse myself. Often, I continue to work in the evenings.

Actually it’s harder for me not doing it than doing it. Like now I’ve finished volume 3, and I told myself I needed to take a break. So this past week I really tried consciously not to do Zohar and it was very difficult. I just felt unfulfilled, like I was wasting my time.

It sounds like you love what you do. So, my last question: Zohar the movie? What do you think?

I think it definitely has cinematic possibilities. The running into the donkey driver and the spectacular account of creation are pretty compelling. But I’ll leave that for others.

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By David Ian Miller

During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area writer and editor David Ian Miller has worked as a city hall reporter, personal finance writer, cable television executive and managing editor of a technology news site. His writing credits include Salon.com, Wired News and The New York Observer.

His “Finding My religion” series of interviews that you can find in SFGate.com look at individual experience of how different people found their religion. It is considered that this is a subject close to all Templars heart, that will surely resonate with some of our own individual experiences, helping us understand how mystical traditions far apart from ours have so many common points. You will also read about people that today follow mystical disciplines that it is said the historical Templar Order was familiar with, including Sufism, Kaballah, Gnosticism, Sacred Geometry, Meditation, etc.