The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

of Luxembourg, Belgium, and Switzerland. This region was once ruled by the Salii, whose name means People of the Salt. These Salic Franks, like the Roman emperors from the time of Augustus, claimed their ancestors came from Troy in Asia Minor—as place-names on the map like Troyes and Paris attest. Ancient Troy itself had profound connections to salt. Bounded on the east by the Ida range of mountains, its Halesian plains are watered by the Tuzla River, whose pre-Turkish name was Salniois—all these names meaning salt.

The Salii claimed that their ancestor Meroveus, “Sea-Born,” was the son of a virgin who’d been impregnated while swimming in salt water. His descendants, the Merovingians, lived in the time of King Arthur. They were believed, like the British king, to possess magical powers associated with the polar axis and its two celestial bears. The name Arthur means bear, and the Merovingians took for their battle standard the figure of an upright female fighting bear.

This connection between salt and bears goes back to two goddesses of ancient mystery. The first is Aphrodite who, like Meroveus, rose “foam-born” from the salt sea. She is ruler of both the dawn and the morning star. The other is Artemis, the virgin bear goddess, whose symbol is the moon, which nightly pulls the tides of the sea. This forms an axis between dawn and night, and also between the celestial pole of the bear and the fathomless sea.

It’s no accident that many place-names in the region just described are connected with aspects of these two. Clairvaux itself means vales of light, and the Aube, the river at Clairvaux, means dawn. Of equal or greater importance then there are those names beginning with arc-, ark-, art-, or arth-, like the Ardennes, named after Arduinna, a Belgian version of Artemis—and the German bär or ber found in place-names like Bern and Berlin. All these names, of course—like Bernard’s itself—mean bear.

In his first ten years as abbot, Bernard de Clairvaux rose swiftly—one might say miraculously—to become the leading French churchman, a confidant of popes. When two popes were elected by separate contingents of Italians and French, Bernard healed the schism and got his own candidate, Innocent II, seated on the pontifical throne. This success was followed by the election of a former Clairvaux monk, Eugenius, as the next pope, for whom Bernard preached the launching of the Second Crusade. Bernard was instrumental, too, in gaining Church sanction for the Knights Templars, an order founded jointly by his uncle André de Montbard and his patron Count Hugues de Troyes.

The Crusades began a millennium after Christ and lasted some two hundred years. Their mission was to reclaim the Holy Land from the “infidel,” al-Islam, and unite the Eastern and Western churches, Constantinople and Rome, with a common focal point in Jerusalem. Of specific importance was to gain Western control of key religious sites, like Solomon’s temple.

The real Temple of Solomon, built around 1000 B.C., was destroyed by the Chaldeans some five centuries later. Though it was rebuilt, many holy relics already were reported missing, including the Ark of the Covenant from the time of Moses, which had been brought back to Jerusalem by Solomon’s father, David. This second temple, refurbished by Herod the Great just before the time of Christ, was razed by the Romans in the Jewish Wars of A.D. 70 and never rebuilt. So the “temple” guarded by the Templars in the Crusades was actually one of two Islamic structures built in the eighth century: the Masjid el-Aqsa, or Farthest Mosque, and the slightly older Dome of the Rock, site of David’s threshing floor and of the Hebrews’ first altar in the Holy Land.

Beneath both these sites ran a vast man-made system of water conduits, caves, and tunnels, begun before the time of David and mentioned many times in the Bible as honeycombing the entire Temple Mount. In these catacombs also lay “Solomon’s stables,” caves used by the Knights Templar, reputedly capable of sheltering two thousand horses. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, the Copper Scroll, lists an inventory of treasure once hidden in these caves, including many ancient Hebrew holy relics and manuscripts, and the spear that pierced the side of Christ.

This spear was discovered by the first Crusaders while besieging Syrian Antioch. Trapped by Saracens for over a month between the inner and outer siege walls, the Crusaders resorted to eating horses and pack animals, and many died of starvation. But one monk had a vision that the famous spear was buried in the Church of St. Peter beneath their very feet. The Crusaders exhumed the spear and bore it before them as a standard. Its powers enabled them to conquer Antioch and march on successfully to storm Jerusalem.

The name Frank—Franko in Old High German—meant spear, while the Franks’ neighbors, the Saxons, were called Sako, meaning sword. These tribes of Germanic warriors proved so formidable that Arab chroniclers called all Crusaders Franks.

“Although the Second Crusade, propagandized by Bernard de Clairvaux, had proved a disaster,” Father Virgilio concluded, “the Templars continued to flourish throughout his lifetime. The abbot of Clairvaux then set himself the curious task of writing one hundred separate allegorical and mystical sermons on the Song of Songs, of which eighty-six were completed at his death. More peculiar still is the fact that Bernard is known to have identified himself with the Shulamite, the black virgin of the poem—with the Church, of course, identified with Solomon, her beloved king. Some believe the Songs are an encoded form of an ancient esoteric initiation ritual which once provided a key to the mystery religions, and that Bernard had deciphered it. Yet the Church’s regard for Bernard was such that he was canonized only twenty years after his death in 1153.”

“What about the Order of Knights Templar that he helped launch?” I asked him. “You told us that later they were convicted of heresy and wiped out.”

“Hundreds of books have been written on their fate,” Virgilio said. “It was