“At the Ruined Tower”
Surrealism and the Templar Legend
“Why this hand of fire ?"
Nadja - André Breton
“…the Prince of Aquitaine in his ruined tower …”
The Chimaeras- Gérard de Nerval
At first glance, the Templars are not very present in the surrealist imagination, which can easily be explained to the extent that they are, as Jean-Pierre Lasalle writes, an order of “Knights of military religions, soldier-monks, combatants and priors, shock commandos but also professed”(1) to be linked, in addition, and notwithstanding the anachronism, to an occupation of the colonial type …Precisely what the surrealists had always rejected with the greatest force! Seen from this angle, the Order founded by Hughes de Payns, in fact governed by a rule drawn up, it is said by Saint Bernard, could hardly seduce the surrealists, even if I have already had the opportunity to show that the Abbot of Clairvaux, maker of Popes and “Parallel and occult leader of Christendom of the century”(2) in whom were found reunited “the two characters of the monk and the knight”(3), has not left certain surrealists indifferent starting with Jean Schuster who often evokes him in his books in particular in T'as vu ça d'ta f'nêtre (You Saw that from your Window). Jean Palou, who was in the 1950’s a member of the surrealist group and the Thébah Lodge, also speaks about him in his essay on La Franc-maçonnerie (Freemasonry) (4) - while referring to the book that René Guenon devoted to him. As for that “old enemy from inside”, Bataille, at the time when he resided in Vézelay, says Christian Limousin, “When he (saw) visitors, (he) led them to La Cordelle, the place where Bernard de Clairvaux preached the second crusade” … Yet as Peter Partner points out in his book the Murdered magicians, the myth - largely Neo-gothic -
1 Jean-Pierre Lasalle. "Lancelot du lac et la réalisation chevaleresque dans l'écossisme”. Salix #4, 1990. In the same article, a note, which will later take on its full meaning, states: “Renaud de Montauban, one of the four Aymon sons, all four on the Bayart Horse, like the ‘Templars, two on the same horse’ ended as did the master Hiram assassinated by three bad companions, while he was on the construction site of the Cologne Cathedral “. Jean-Pierre Lassalle was a member of the surrealist group from 1959 to 1966. Italics are his.
2 Jean Markale. Gisors et l’énigme des Templiers. Pygmalion, Paris, 1997
3 René Guénon: Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel (Spiritual authority and temporal power). Guy Trédaniel Editor, Paris. 1990.
4 Jean Palou. La Franc-maçonnerie. Payot, Paris, 1964. René Guénon. Saint Bernard, Publiroc, Paris 1929.
associated with their name “can be considered part of the magical occult humus that fertilized romantic literature and later symbolism” (5) - then surrealism! To facilitate the understanding of what will follow, a word must be said here about this movement of thought still alive today that is not so easy to define, and which, without being - no offence to the Academy - just another literary or artistic school, has produced a good number of masterpieces of the past century. Breton initially presents it as “Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, apart from any aesthetic or moral concern”, this definition is quickly revealed as being too narrow. Even if he also speaks in La Révolution Surréaliste “of leading to a new declaration of human rights” and endorses both Marx’s slogan “to transform the world”, which will evolve into “re-enchanting the world” and that of Rimbaud “to change life” by means of the creation of a new myth, it quickly turns out that surrealism’s primary objective is to restore full powers to the imagination by opening up to the marvellous in all its forms, by seeking, in contempt of the beyond, only to explore reality as it is by all means, even if it means drawing, as Fabrice Flahutez says, from an “immemorial background of traditional images and symbols to make something new”… Knowing in addition that Jean-Claude Silbermann, by proclaiming loud and clear in 1999 the great detestation of the surrealists for all the “kneeling” and other “squatting”, summed up another whole section of their thought, this violent rejection of the religious which does not however ignore the sacred, we will complete the picture, if I may say so, with this beautiful proposition by Stanislas Rodanski, “Surrealism is a free cause in the hearts of walking men !” The Templars, in fact, to come back to it, these “Red Monks” of Breton traditions, not very popular in the West at the time of their splendour, appear here and there at the bend of this or that surrealist work or at the margin, in a sort of recurring wink, as in Mes Funérailles, perhaps, this canvas painted in 1945 by Clovis Trouille, with joyfully flamboyant anarchism and anticlericalism… The mystery, in fact which surrounds this “military and religious order destroyed in the thirteenth century by the complicity of the priesthood and the Empire, for a moment reconciled in the execution of a villainous crime”(6), its dissolution, its possible survival in hiding, the curse uttered by its dying dignitaries, its “destiny”, as Gérard de Sède says, “both profane and sacred, brief and lasting, tragic and triumphant, white and black like the Baucent”, “half of sand and half of Silver”(7), but also the myth, which could only intrigue the surrealists, so quick to hunt down the marvellous in all its forms, to say nothing of the speculations about their supposed “treasure” or the exact nature of the Baphomet -
5 Peter Partner. Templiers, Francs-maçons et sociétés secrètes (The Murdered Magicians). Pygmalion, Paris, 1992.
6 Gilbert Durand : Les Mythes fondateurs de la franc-maçonnerie. Dervy, Paris. 2002.
7 As Pierre Girard-Augry writes in his book on Les Hauts Grades chevaleresques de la Strict Observance Templière au XVIIIème siècle. Dervy, Paris 1995.
which some suggest could have even been the shroud said to be of Turin (8)… In the perspective of the special issue of the Quebec Review edited by David Nadeau, La Vertèbre et le Rossignol , devoted to the question, and without claiming to be exhaustive, it is true that a few outcrops of the Templar myth in surrealism and its surroundings, came immediately to mind, not all of them flattering as when José Pierre called Simon Hantaï (9) and Georges Mathieu in 1959 “Templars of the smear” after the scandal of the very reactionary “ceremonies commemorating the second condemnation of Siger de Brabant”, organized by them. Here again, in fact, let us remember Gérard de Nerval, so loved by the surrealists, perhaps in search of the landscapes and the Druze traditions of Lebanon, during his Voyage to the Orient, of some memory of the Temple which seems, according to him to have “borrowed a lot of ideas from them” (10) … And Guillaume Apollinaire, as an inspired precursor, was he not already writing in Alcools with his usual lyricism
Flaming Templars I burn among you
Let us prophecy together O great master I am
The desirable fire that devotes itself to you
And the gyre turns, Oh beautiful beautiful night
We know in a few words, the history of L’Ordre des Pauvres Chevaliers du Christ et du temple de Salomon, founded in 1119 by Hughes de Payns and eight other knights, dissolved by Pope Clement V at the instigation of the King of France Philip IV the Fair, the princeps cupidus, in 1312 after the arrest of the knights in 1307. We know the fate of Jacques de Molay, last grand master of the Order, burned alive in 1314 on l'île aux Juifs, on the site of the current Square du Vert Galant, where Mandiargues places the strange final scene of his novel Tout disparaîtra, in l'île de la Cité, in front of the Louvre, in Paris, and the manner in which he summoned, it is said, the King and the Pope to appear before God in short notice, cursing the whole dynasty of the Capetians in the process. It is from the rest of the destruction of the Temple, that “Spiritual chivalry” considered as the last holder of the Tradition in the West, that René Guénon, whom Breton held in such high esteem that he regretted not having been able to convince him to join the founders of surrealism, makes a point of rupture, the starting point of the decline of the West in that it marks the moment when “overturning normal relations, the temporal power began (…) to use spiritual authority towards political ends”(11) - an opinion shared later by two surrealists among the most qualified in esotericism, René Alleau and Jean Palou - as well perhaps as Jean-Pierre Lasalle who in his text “Le Dire Sodalitaire”, which he “wished to publish in 1959 or 1960 when he was in the
,
8 In ABCDaire de la franc-maçonnerie Templière, under the direction of Pierre Girard-Augry. Editions les 3 Spirales, La Motte d’algues, France, 2005.
9 Former member of the group!
10 Gérard de Nerval, Le Voyage en Orient, volume 2, “Druses et Maronites”, II, IV : “Le cheik druse”. Nouvelle Librairie de France, Paris.1960.
11 René Guénon: Autorité spirituelle et pouvoir temporel (Spiritual authority and temporal power), op.cit.
group”, observes that “ the Acme of the chivalrous adventure was the creation of the military religions of the Temple and of the Saint John Hospital”(12)…Also staying in Paris between the arrest of the Templars and the execution of Jacques de Molay, while the smoke from the pyres rises, was the author of the Divine Comedy, this Dante whom Saint Bernard welcomes at the entrance of paradise, this Dante whom we strongly suspect to have belonged to an esoteric para-Templar structure, the Fede Santa, this Dante who evokes in the bend of a verse “the assembly of white coats” and whom a medal kept in Vienna presents as “Fidei Sanctae Kadosh” and “Frater Templars”, this Dante that Breton, again, recognizes, from the first Manifesto, as undoubtedly surrealist before the hour… In fact the Order of the Temple, this religious institution whose grand master was not even a priest - an incredible phenomenon in the medieval context - and was not accountable to the Pope, did not disappear in all western countries. In Portugal, in fact, the poet-king Denis the First, anxious to keep in his service a military force of this quality renamed it “Order of Christ” and kept it within its walls, in particular those of the Fortress of Tomar (13), whose church, with its octagonal “Syriac type” choir called the “charola” in which, recalls Gilbert Durand, “the knights were authorized to attend the service mounted on horseback, in a circle around the officiant”(14), presents such a special character…In Scotland, “supreme redundancy with the ‘Sons of the Valley’(15), some of them, who had found asylum with Robert the Bruce, intervened, it is said, decisively alongside the Scots during the battle of Bannockburn, near Stirling, against the English. Grateful, the Scottish ruler created for them the Order of Saint Andrew of the Thistle, later reawakened by his distant Stuart descendants in exile in Saint-Germain en Laye. And there would exist, in Kilmartin and in other cemeteries of Argyll, Templar tombs after the official end of the Order (16). Hence, on the one hand the cross pattée - although with a strong red border, that of the Order of Christ - on the ships engaged in these expeditions (17) largely financed by the Order
12 Jean Pierre Lassalle : “Ordo ab chao” in Supérieur inconnu # 14. April-June 1999. Paris.
13 Or those of Paco da Éga, in Condeixa-a-Nova, within which an exhibition was held during the summer of 2014, wrongly called International Surrealism Now! If the place was splendid, in fact, within the sixty some works presented, executed - that's the word - by about thirty artists from all over the world, there were only very rare exceptions of surrealism - and most often the most absolute kitsch, which is all the more regrettable since there was then in Coimbra an authentic surrealist group, the Cape Mondego section of Portuguese surrealism, bringing together around Miguel De Carvalho, Rik Lina, Seixas Peixoto, Pedro Prata, Joao Rasteiro and a few others ...
14 Gilbert Durand : Les Mythes fondateurs de la franc-maçonnerie, op.cit. It is Jean Tourniac, in his book De la Chevalerie au secret du Temple (Dervy, Paris. 1969) who speaks of a "Syriac type" Charola.
15 Gilbert Durand, ibid.
16 At the same time, it is very interesting to see Gilbert Durand, in the above-mentioned work, consider it useful to specify when speaking of “the flaming star”, this “star pentagram containing the letter G”: “We noted on the back of the tombstones of the Templar cemetery of the Convent of Tomar (Portugal) many pentagrams” …
17 Remember that it was this Order that was behind the creation of the training centre for long-term captains in Sagres, near Cape Saint-Vincent!
itself which, in the following century, under the leadership of Henri the Navigator, will make of the Atlantic a “Portuguese Sea” (18) - the same cross found in the work Terra Brasilis by Seixas Peixoto a member of the Cape Mondego section of Surrealism. Hence, on the other hand, the Templar Legend - pure legend in view of the most recent research (19) but nevertheless a strain of which remains as “a fundamental structure, both in the R.E.R (Rectified Scottish Rite) and in the structure of the High Grades” (20) - invented or at least highly instrumentalised for political ends by the Jacobites, such as le Chevalier Ramsay who in his famous speech of 1736 speaks of a “Jacques Lord Stewart of Scotland (…) Grand Master of a lodge established in Kilwinnen (sic), in the west of Scotland in the year 1286, shortly after the death of Alexander III King of Scotland”, but also associated, then, with certain high grades of Scottish Rite freemasonry, in particular, around 1740-1750, that of the Sublime Order of Elected Knights, also that of the White and Black Eagle, the Kadosh Templar condemned by the Count-Abbot of Clermont, then “Grand Master of all the regular lodges of France”… But in the rest of Europe, the surviving Templars integrated as best they could into the other orders of warrior monks and we no longer hear too much talk about the Order of the Temple until Ramsay, then Baron Karl Von Hund in Germany with the regime known as the Strict Templar Obedience - a time associated with the Templar Clerical of Johann-August Von Starck - and finally of Brother Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat in France who did not give it more than an ephemeral vigour, in the second half of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century, respectively. Without forgetting, at the end of the said century, the Order of the Rose-Cross, of the Temple and the Grail of the Sâr Péladan, whose influence was exerted on Jacques Vaché in particular, and who wrote: “Doesn’t the Order of the Temple realize the Order of the Grail, and doesn’t Monsalvat have a real name, Montségur?” (21) … This is another story – even though Paul Sanda, host at Cordes Sur Ciel - the birthplace of Fabré-Palaprat - of the Maison des Surréalistes and editor in 2004 of the collective anthology of short stories entitled Templiers: les yeux du Baphomet (22) (Templars: the Eyes of Baphomet), does not disdain to wear, in his capacity of 47th (or 59th) Grand Master of the (secret) Order of the Temple (23), the white mantle stamped with the cross pattée gules! In this book appear in particular, from the pen of Paul Sanda himself, an incantatory evocation of names of tortured Templars as well as the beautiful text of the Swiss surrealist Alain-Pierre Pillet, "Les deux frères", and those of two other proven surrealists Jehan Van Langhenhoven and Sarane Alexandrian who, for his part
18 Fernando Pessoa, who, moreover, in a manuscript note not destined for publication claimed "to have been initiated into the three minor ranks of the Templar Order of Portugal" (Robert Bréchon).
19 André Kervella : Le Mystère de la Rose Blanche, Francs-maçons et Templiers au XVIIIème siècle, Dervy, Paris. 2009.
20 Gilbert Durand : Les Mythes fondateurs de la franc-maçonnerie, op.cit.
21 Joséphin Péladan : Le secret des Troubadours - De Parsifal à Don Quichotte. E. Sansot, Paris, 1996.
22 Les Yeux du Baphomet, collective publication. Editions Rafael de Surtis / Editinter. 2004.
23 At least that is how he signs his contribution to the special issue “Surréalisme et mythe Templier” of the Quebec surrealist review La Vertèbre et la Rossignole (Spring 2015).
starting from the way a basic knight (having really existed) receives the accusations against the Order, dismantles the charges against it and brings them back to what they really are: tragic consequences of the greed, carelessness and jealousy of the powerful.
Yet it is this legend of the survival of the Order of the Temple in the British Isles that Leonora Carrington alludes to in her novel The Hearing Trumpet (1956) in which appear, in “an old fortress on the occidental coast”, the citadel of Conor, a veritable Montsalvage sheltering as with Wagner nothing less than the Grail stolen “during the crusade”, mysterious Templars “who had escaped the purge and had been hiding in Ireland” where they had “prospered and grown”, initiating “fanatics into the secrets of their order” “under the patronage of certain Irish nobles” and in particular a family linked to king “Malcolm” (perhaps Màel Coluim, King of the Scots), the Moorheads(24), before, “for some fifty years”, creating “in secret groups all over the continent” and as far as Avignon - the town of Clément V…see more below! However, in this text where borrowings from Celtic myths, gnosis, the gothic novel, Kabbalah, alchemy and therefore the Templar legend, among others, are mixed against the backdrop of “planetary apocalypse”(25), “the Arcanum”, as Leonora Arrington calls the Grail, is kept in an underground vault sealed two centuries earlier following the suspicious deaths of twelve knights, under the care of a “horned apparition which sparkled like polished gold”…and which could well be the Baphomet as the author represents it - that is to say in the manner of the esotericists of the end of the nineteenth or the beginning of the twentieth century…
Two other writers, members in their time of surrealist groups, commented on the Templars in books for the general public, Gérard de Sède, for example, poet of L'Incendie Habitable and member of La Main à Plume, the group of young people who maintained the surrealist idea in Paris during the German occupation, published in 1962 a book which met with great success, Les Templiers sont parmi nous, (The Templars are amongst us), in which he developed the history of the mythical “Priory of Sion” - “supposed to have been at the origin of the creation of the Temple and affirmed on the basis of a fragile testimony, that of Roger Lhormoy, guardian of the Castle of Gisors, of the rantings of a rather suspicious “esotericist”, Pierre Plantard, and of the writings of the romantic author Charles Nodier - that the Templar treasure was buried under the dungeon of Gisors, in the Norman Vexin, while suggesting with a remarkable sense of the right expression, that the Order has survived in hiding over the centuries; “In Gisors, less than an hour from Paris, the Templars are amongst us.” Or again, “Gisors belongs to the lovers of Isis” … Jean Markale, as for him, specialist in celtism and member of the surrealist group from the beginning of the 50’s to the year 1976, at least, which saw him collaborate on the collective work La Civilisation surréaliste, published under the direction of Vincent
24 Possible alchemical allusion, but “Moorhead” is also the name of Carrington's maternal grandmother. Also note that there were four “Malcolms” on the Scottish Throne.
25 Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron
Bounoure, published in 1986 a book entitled Gisors ou l'énigme des Templiers, which examines and moreover often refutes, but sometimes ambiguously, the daring theses of his predecessor. Insisting, too, on the considerable role played by Bernard de Clairvaux, who “was at the centre of the whirlwind where the Temple took its form and emerged from the limbo in which it remained in a state of stagnation”, he underlines, thus giving perhaps at the beginning of the chapter, the key to the interest shown in them by certain surrealists, that “the Templars crossed the stage of history to enter the tumultuous cycle of myth”, and this even before their disappearance, since they appear from the beginning of the thirteenth century in the German version of the legend of the Grail, strongly tinged with esotericism, that of Wolfram von Eschenbach, who makes them the guardians of the Grail. And Markale observes that from the point of view of the Bavarian poet, taken up by Wagner, it is a question of an “elite body extremely closed and extremely secret”, an initiatory community, even a “black order” something somewhat sulphurous! It is undoubtedly for this reason that Julien Gracq, in his play Le Roi Pêcheur (The Fisher King), however strongly inspired by the same Wagner, takes care not to adorn the coats of his “Grail Knights” with the “cross of gules”, but with the “dove of the grail”, the Paraclete perhaps…We will not fail to remember here, in passing, that the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, often represented under the aspect of the dove, was in great honour among the Templars, for whom the Pentecost “was the greatest solemnity”, writes Jules Michelet, who, suspecting some oriental influence there, adds that “the Baphomet would have been for the Gnostics the Paraclete descended on the apostles in the form of tongues of fire”… It is undoubtedly also this “mythification” of the Templars which brings Jean Markale - still writing that “through all the regions of France, whose roads they have criss-crossed, they have left, here and there, elsewhere and everywhere, shadows that are not easy to dispel” -, to conclude that there was obviously a parallel esoteric clandestine structure to which the official Order dissolved in 1312 “was blindly subject” - which seems to confirm, it must be said, this passage of the “ritual of admission” addressed to the applicant “Of our Order you see only the bark that is outside.”(26)… Perhaps the “Sons of the Valley” evoked by this little known figure of German romanticism that was the mystical freemason Zacharias Werner in his play Die Söhne des Thal's, this dramatic poem from 1803 very marked by the ideas of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin and whose “dramatic springs are reflected more or less by all the ‘Templarisms’ of the eighteenth century” (27).
We can also certainly hypothesize that Breton - given his great friendship with Pierre Mabille, dignitary of the Droit Humain (International Order of Freemasonry), Jean Palou, René Alleau, Bernard Roger, Elie-Charles Flamand, Guy René Doumayrou and some other members of the Thebah lodge - of the Grande Loge de France - but also with Robert Ambelain and Robert Amadou, both masons - knew this Templar strain of high Masonic grades, going back, as we have seen, to a Chevalier Ramsay who belonged to the entourage of the Pretender, to Saint Germain en Laye, and to the Templar Strict Observance created by Baron Karl von Hund - Eques ab Ense - Knight of the Sword - a man also linked, it seems to the Jacobites - notably to
26 Laurent Dailliez : Règle et statuts de l’Ordre du Temple. Dervy, Paris. 1996.
27 Gilbert Durand : Les Mythes fondateurs de la franc-maçonnerie, op.cit.
Andrew Lumisden - and their political projects… Breton, in fact, was not unaware of Martinès de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, two of the founders, with Jean Baptiste Willermoz, of the Order of the Knights Masons Elus Cohen of the Universe, an atypical para-Masonic organisation from the end of the eighteenth century. Eques ab Eremo - Knight of the Desert - whose “arms carried ‘a hermit with his lance on the shoulder on a field of azure’”, as Jean Palou says, Willermoz was also a disciple of Martinès. But also linked for a time to Von Hund, he was to play a major role in the development of the Rectified Scottish Rite (R.E.R.) which in its top ranks, borrows a lot, in any case, from the Templar legend. And it is not anodyne, to note here, with André Kervella that Von Hund like Pasqually claimed to be from a Masonry that was…Stuartist!(28) But I have specifically talked about Robert Amberlain whose work Breton followed to the point of annotating some of the books he owned notably Le Martinisme! However Amberlain, who had also participated in the investigation leading up to the drafting by Breton and Legrand of L’Art Magique, was from 1960 to 1985, the world Grand Master of the French Grand Lodge of the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm and several other Masonic lodges or initiate orders. Ambelain, who thought that a “secret inner circle” (29) had existed within the Order of the Temple also wrote, among other texts, in 1972, Jésus ou le mortel secret des Templiers (Jesus or the mortal secret of the Templars) which he concludes with these lines: “Drowned in the crowd, in groups of three or four, the Companions, carpenters and stonemasons, a sort of incorporated third-order protected by the Knights of the Temple, had heard Molay’s voice like a sentence. It was for them both an order and a signal of hope. For this, the cathedrals of France would remain such and their towers unfinished. But vengeful thought would walk patiently from century to century. Three times, the King’s descendants would die out with three brothers. (…) The Jacquerie of 1358 (30) would be a prelude to the Jacobin Revolution of 1789; the Jacques, led by Jacques Bonhomme, would one day avenge Jacques de Molay. And it is from the tower of their Temple where the heads of the Order were ‘questioned”, that the twenty-second successor of Philippe the Fair would leave one morning in January 1793, on his final voyage”(31)… How not to bring these lines closer to what Breton already wrote in 1947 in the “Ajours” of Arcane 17 about “the supposed route followed through Paris by the ‘avengers of the Templars” which merges with “the one that he had unconsciously followed with Nadja” and especially this excerpt from “Pont Neuf” (1950) about Place Dauphine, this “sacred place”(32) over which hovers a “taboo”: “It is, undoubtedly, the sex of Paris which takes shape under these shadows. Its pubic hair is still sometimes burning, once a year, because of
28 André Kervella : Les Rois Stuart et la Franc-maçonnerie. Editions Ivoire-Claire, Brétignolles sur Mer. 2013
29 See Drames et secrets de l’histoire 1306-1643. Robert Laffont, Paris. 1981
30 The “Avengers of the Templars” are also sometimes credited with the English peasant revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler.
31 Italics are from Ambelain. Ambelain returned to this question in 1981 in Drames et secrets de l'histoire 1306-1643. (Robert Laffont, Paris. 1981)
32 Italics are from Breton
the execution of the Templars which was consummated there on March13, 1313 and which is thought to have played a large part in the revolutionary destiny of the city” … This parallel established by Breton between the disappearance of the Templars and the revolutionary destiny of Paris undoubtedly owes nothing to chance. Perhaps the author of “Pont-Levis” had heard from his freemason friends about the book, among others, of Cadet (de) Gassicourt, Le Tombeau de Jacques Molai, Histoire secrète et abrégée des initiés anciens et modernes, des Templiers, Francs-maçons, illuminés, etc. (1797), who with his “hyperbolic and delusional denunciations”, as Gilbert Durand says, made masons, particularly those who reached the rank of Knight Kadosh whose coat of arms is stamped with the cross pattée gules, the famous “Sons of the Valley”, the avengers of the Templars… Moreover, didn’t Jean Palou write, as for him : “For us, and without it being currently possible to develop our point of view now, the Kadosh represents the Knight defender of the Grail (33), Guardians of the Holy City which can be in Brittany, in Brocéliande, in Anjou, in the City of the Sun or in the mists of Thule, or in a perfectly ‘historical’ way, in Jerusalem when the Templars occupied around 1135-1140 a building erected ‘on what was in Antiquity, the Court of the Temple of Israel’, for in the unity that allows us to find the Rites and the Symbols, all the Traditions are but one, on the Principle”(34). Lines with an obviously special meaning where, in the shadow of René Guénon, the legend of the Grail, the Templar myth and the Rectified Scottish Rite through its Knights Benificent of the Holy City seem to merge into a single representation of Knighthood…
In a somewhat singular manner and even if it seems, however, a little difficult to follow, Sarane Alexandrian for his part also brings together the large painting Antipope, painted in the United States between December 1941 and March 1942 by a Max Ernst inspired, he says, by the visiting of the future author of the Mirror of Magic, Kurt Seligmann, and his library of occultism, with the Templar myth that interests us, arguing that the painter feminized it and gave it a clear evil connotation! He writes in fact: “This Antipope presents himself as a black man-horse, with an ovoid outgrowth on his forehead, whose two fingers of the extended hand form an inverted V (sign of the victory of the forces from below). He is surrounded by the priestesses of his nocturnal cult; only one, half-naked, in pink feather jacket, has the appearance of a real woman. Two others have tree trunk bodies; the three figures on the left have the heads of night birds, horses, and a red insect with a hairy trunk. Ernst painted the servants of a secret religion similar to that of the Templars; his Antipope has the horse aspect which is attributed to their black god Baphomet” (35) …
33 And a note from Palou here refers to “Wolfram von Eisenbach” (sic) and to the issue of Les Cahiers du Sud devoted in 1951 to the Lumière du Graal and prepared by René Nelli - of which Lucien Coutaud will later illustrate a book! Note that the spelling of the word Kadosh varies between authors.
34 Jean Palou, op. cit. Italics, capitals and quotation marks are by Jean Palou.
35 Sarane Alexandrian: Max Ernst, Somogy, Paris. 1992.
The name of another proven surrealist, on the other hand, and not the least, that of Bordeaux resident Pierre Molinier, is also linked, in a certain way to the Templar myth and several of his works, at least three, on the theme of Baphomet, are there to testify, like this Petit Baphomet of 1968, for example, where he represents himself with a flower in the anus, possessed by one of his magical daughters, which announces the splendid Baphomet of an allure quite clearly androgynous, painted again in 1971, a work described with precision, in his Pierre Molinier et la tentation de l'Orient, by Pierre Petit who also points out very well its hermetic characteristic - while indicating that one can “reasonably estimate that Notre Dame des Rats”, the “esoteric and medieval novel” of Alfred Jarry’s friend Rachilde, “where Templars and Baphomet are staged, served as a springboard for the painter-photographer’s imagination”. According to Petit, moreover, who had confirmed this during a meeting with the artist himself, on June 7, 1973, the latter would, therefore, from his training years “enter into le Compagnonnage”, “this kind of ‘Companionship’ which can do anything”, in 1922 on his return from military service… And Molinier, keen on esotericism and a great reader of Serge Hutin’s works, specifies: “ This Companionship dates back to the time of the Crusades. There were Companions who followed the Crusaders: they did a bit of everything. Weapons, armour, architecture, castles. And they gave me certain trade secrets so to speak…” Petit adds that previously in 1972, during another interview, Molinier told him that “his brotherhood was attached to the tradition of non-believing Templars who were asked, in order to achieve his title of ‘Master-Companion’, to walk on the Cross” - “who did not hesitate”, completes Petit elsewhere, “to blaspheme, even to walk on the cross, and who will have so much trouble with the established Church” (37) … The letterhead used by the painter, as well as many of his works, bore “the emblem of this brotherhood”, its Companion stamp, characterized by the association of a certain number of objects with strong symbolic content, “a ruler, an open compass, an ancient level turned upside down, a set square and, crossing it all, a flaming and twisted sword”, accompanied by the acronyms C.D.S and M.D.V meaning respectively Companion of Knowledge and Master of Truth - or “Companion Master of Truth AND knowledge”, according to the interpretations proposed by Pierre Petit… And it must have been, in fact, in a way more in conformity with the detestation manifested by the painter towards the “priests (of) religion in general and (of) objects of worship”, a group of “free thinkers who believe in nothing at all, who admit nothing, neither God nor the Devil!” We can in any case think so when reading these two lines of his poem from October 1953, “the Cursed”, “I spat on a Christ/ in a gutter of bronze”, which, as Pierre Petit observes, “recalls one of the usual sacrifices of the heresiarch Templars which Molinier reclaimed” (38). Because the accusations, probably unfounded, “of crimes considered then as abominable: sacrilege, sodomy, worship of an idol nicknamed ‘Baphomet’, etc.” were, as Pierre Petit does not fail to point out, “so many acts which delighted a
36There is still, at least, according to Pierre Petit, a “Dessin pour ‘Le Baphomet”.
37 Pierre Petit : Pierre Molinier et la tentation de l’Orient, Opales/Pleine Page éditeurs, Bordeaux, 2005.
38 Pierre Petit : Molinier une vie d’enfer, Ramsey/Jean Jaques Pauvert, Paris. 1992.
fundamentally anticlerical Molinier” (39) … And it is again Petit, moreover, who affirms that “the most daring paintings” of Molinier’s erotic period “reflect his taste for blasphemy” … But can we fail to notice the similarity between the relationship that the artist thus establishes between Masonry and the Templar myth and the link that exists between “the Masonry of the builders and chivalry” in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth degrees of the R.E.A.A or to the third order of the French Rite?”. “A link often mentioned because the knights of the Crusade were the builders of a whole system of forts and fortifications in Palestine and therefore needed a large workforce of skilled workers”, adds Gilbert Durand…
“Comrade(s) if not Companion(s) of those painters in the service of poetry” (40), two other artists who, although never belonging to a surrealist group, deserve to be qualified as “painters of the surreal” (41), Felix Labisse and Lucien Coutaud, who moreover knew each other and exhibited together on several occasions, also produced significant works in which the attraction exerted by soldier-monks and their insignia was present. This is evidenced by, among other things, at least three other titles - Damarbres et chevalier du Temple, Parmi ces dames de Nîmes se trouvait un chevalier du Temple and Templier de Nîmes - alluding to the Templars, a 1965 etching by Lucien Coutaud, Le chevalier du Temple, a figure broken up into fragments representing in particular, it seems, the location of the heart of the Temple of Solomon (in its current form, the wall of Lamentations and the Dome of the Rock) and as a crest the Celestial Jerusalem. About this work, Paul Sanda again, in the catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition devoted to the artist at the Gaillac museum from June to September 2014, wrote a text dated…from “march 18, 2104, seventh centenary of the death of Jacques de Molay, Chevalier du Temple!” (42). And we can read in particular that Lucien Coutaud, of whom there is a portrait dressed as the Sâr Péladan, “was able to root out in the vitality of the Order what he had felt from the immemorial grandeur of the quest, this flow of chivalrous depth that most people want to ignore, or want to persist in passing off as heretical and unfounded”…Also a great admirer of Wagner’s Parsifal, Coutaud, who was also very interested in the Baphomet of the Saint-Merri church (43), in Paris, as Jean Binder points out in the same catalogue, had moreover been sufficiently marked by Gérard de Sède’s book to go to Gisors, visiting the castle and bringing back several gouaches. As for Labisse, one of his lithographs, La Sainte Hermanda, shows us two female silhouettes side by side on a midnight blue background, the head and upper body veiled in black. What we see of the body of the one on the left is red, blue for the one on the right, and each of them holds the hilt of a solid sword in one hand adorned with an indisputable cross pattée, blue for one, red for the other!
39 Pierre Petit : Pierre Molinier et la tentation de l’Orient, op.cit.
40 Robert Desnos on Félix Labisse
41 Christophe Dauphin on Lucien Coutaud.
42 The italics are from Paul Sanda.
43 A sculpture dating, However, a from the 19th century - also mentioned by Eugène Canseliet, Fulcanelli's disciple.
At the extreme margin, finally, of the surrealist movement, since he was also called upon in the 1950’s by Breton, who he had met at the time of Contre-attaque, as part of the preliminary investigation into L'Art magique, Pierre Klossowski, founding member of the secret society Acéphale, “transform(s) the legend of the Templars into a myth”, as Maurice Blanchot says about the character, “dressed in the white and black costume of the pages of the Temple” of Ogier de Beauséant. His book Le Baphomet, of which, by the way, Pierre Molinier had a copy, and which was the subject of a somewhat stormy reception, in particular from Roger Caillois, is thus presented by Albert-Marie Schmidt in his article “Une fantaisie gnostique” published in Réforme in June 1965: “Having listened to the lessons of the Ismaili Gnostics in the Middle-East, having formed a mystery society like them, the Templars provided Pierre Klossowski with an opportunity for sublime ramblings. Instead of writing a cold novel about the annihilation of the Order of the temple, he imagines that after his ordeal the great master Jacques de Molay, his martyred brothers, the king who brought him to death, the seducers who led him into temptation, continue to haunt the places they frequented during their lifetime. All awaiting the final reintegration, they are reduced to the state and condition of spirits”. In this work, “gnosis or fable, oriental tale” transgressive and metaphysical in the manner of his friend and mentor Bataille, whose action takes place on the eve of their arrest, he too suggests the existence of an esoteric Temple on several levels of initiation and seems to lend credence to the various accusations made against them, even going so far as to suggest that they were perhaps not unfounded, from the most benign, like that of being bon vivants - this scene of the hallucinatory ritual banquet “of the spirits” where paradoxically there is good food and where “the wine flows freely” - to the most serious - worship of an idol, denial of Christ, homosexuality…: “Should they or should they not justify the most obscure of their rites, the spitting on the cross, because they knew among themselves what they were denying?”… Moreover, even if he makes of Baphomet, in his novel, an androgynous and sensual figure, Klossowski, in the “notes and clarifications” published later, estimated that the three phonemes of the word “Baphomet” would mean in a ciphered way Basileus philosophorum metallicorum: the sovereign of metallurgical philosophers, that is to say the laboratories of alchemists who were set up in various Templeries” (45), adds its particular touch of eroticism as much as of esotericism to the Templar myth and mystery…
44 With a strong Masonic connotation, by Klossowski's own admission. It should be noted that the unusual word "Templerie” also appears in the above-cited work by Joséphin Péladan.
45 The italics are from Klossowski.
Myth and mystery, also at the heart, as we have seen, of eighteenth century Illuminism, this true “dark side” of the Enlightenment of which Pierre Mollier measures the scope as well as the stake when he writes: “It does not matter whether the survival of the Templars is, or is not, an invention. On the fringes of the orthodoxy of churches and of secular history, the Templar legend has created a place welcoming the most diverse speculations. The same causes producing the same effects for three centuries, in literature or in esoteric movements, the Templars harbour in the folds of their great cloak for the better - or - sometimes - for the worst (…) the ‘quest’ of men who, today as yesterday feel like strangers in a daily life too profane. Refuge or springboard towards another horizon… the Templar legend remains, in modernity, a point of attachment to resistance against ‘the disenchantment of the world’”! (46)
But it is to the subtle author of Bourges, cité première, Philippe Audoin, close companion of Breton, to whom we will give the last word. In his preface, en 1977, to Les Minutes de sable mémorial by Jarry, he thus evokes with a slight touch of humour, “an advertising poster which could be seen not long ago on the walls of Paris: two recumbent figures of grey stone, in armour, hands clasped, at the bottom of some vault, their shields and their helmets, loaded with crosses pattée, sufficiently designates them as Knights of the Temple. But here is where the scandal stems from: these two funeral effigies are laughing to death ! And the public walks past, amused by the laughter of the old dead, without thinking too much about trying the Banyuls wine for which they are doing the soliciting. Nothing serious, the poster affirms it: it is a question of remembering the “bons vivants” and in addition we know that the Templars were seen as being surrealists in the red wine "- as indeed indicated in a… collective surrealist text from 1931!
46 Pierre Mollier : La Chevalerie Maçonnique. Dervy, Paris, 2008. Pierre Mollier is the director of the library, archives and musée du Grand Orient de France in Paris.
47 Philippe Audoin : Bourges, cité première. Julliard, Paris. 1972.
Patrick Lepetit
Translated by Erik Volet 2022
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