[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Aquitaine, as did most of the bishops of the western church and hundreds of knighted
nobles. Even St. Bernard, who was heard to grumble at the expense of gilding a church,
attended, compelled perhaps by an authority greater than his own ego, the power brokers
of Sion.
From its beginnings at St. Denis, the new style spread first through central France, and then
all over Europe, from England to Germany, Portugal to Northern Italy. The collection of
artists and craftsmen assembled by Abbot Suger developed into schools and guilds that
traveled throughout Europe for the next two centuries or so creating a vast collection of
Gothic churches and civic buildings. Twelve years after the good Abbot's death in 1151, his
student, the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, and his "master mason," William of Paris,
paid him the compliment of bettering his design.
On an island in the Seine, the new cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris rose slowly into the
light filled sky. Work on the choir and transepts were begun in 1163 and not completed until
1182. By the time the construction of the nave was under way, another change was
sweeping through Christendom.
Jerusalem and most of Holy Land was conquered in 1187 by the forces of the Seljuk Sultan
Saladin. The west was stunned and plans began for an immediate Crusade, the Third
according to modern historians. (The Second Crusade had been the unhappy affair
undertaken in 1147 by Louis VII, during which the Abbot Suger of St. Denis ruled France as
regent. Suger in fact did do so well with the realm's finances that Louis' disastrous crusade
hardly made a dent in the royal coffers.) In the midst of this political upheaval occurred the
Cutting of the Elm at Gisors, the schism between the Order of Our Lady of Sion and the
Knights of the Temple of Solomon. For over a decade, Sion had been building a private
power base back in Europe, and after the loss of the abbey on Mount Sion, the entire Order
relocated.
This shift began in 1152, the year after Abbot Suger's death, with Louis VII's gift to the
Order of the large priory at Orleans of St. Samson, another Dark Age saint with Merovingian
connections. By 1178, as we noted above, the Order was confirmed by the Pope in the
possession of houses and large tracts of land from the Holy Land to Spain. The Cutting of
the Elm at Gisors did more than just split the Templars off from its parent Order, it defined
the boundary line between the Plantagenets on one side, supported by the Templars, and
the Capetians on the other, supported by Sion. This division would eventually produce not
just the destruction of the Templars by the French King, Philip III and his puppet Pope,
Clement V, but the catastrophe of the Hundred Years War between France and England.
As the walls of Notre Dame de Paris rose, the foundations of the new illuminated
Christendom began to crumble. Loss of Jerusalem, and eventually the rest of Outremer,
made the universal nature of the church questionable. The Grail Romances, whose imagery
would appear in the decorations of both Notre Dame de Paris and the cathedral at Amiens,
attempted an end-run around the church itself by appealing directly to a chivalric sense of
destiny. With the failure of the Third Crusade and the subsequent strife among its leaders,
the grand plan began to falter.
The Orthodox church fought back in the so-called crusades against Christians. First, almost
by accident, Constantinople was conquered by the Fourth Crusade. This empowered Pope
Innocent III to go after the heretics in southern France. Fifty years later, with southern
France and its culture destroyed, the hope of a new kind of Christianity, once so promising,
had been lost.
* * * * *
For a century after the discoveries in the Holy Land, alchemy remained the secret preserve
of the initiates within the church. The Order of Sion and the Templars seem to have had
their own alchemical processes and their own individual codes for referring to it. Not until
the middle of the 13th century did alchemy surface in a direct and unambiguous way.
By the time the external decorations, including the magnificent bas-relief rendition of
Alchemy itself on the Great Porch of Notre Dame de Paris, were finished in 1235 the reason
for secrecy had passed. The Imperial Orthodox Church of Rome was in ascendancy with
both the Templars and the Order of Sion struggling to find a new mission. Power politics had
also stabilized, somewhat, with the Holy Roman Empire as top dog of the feudal pack. The
Middle Ages were reaching for their apogee, while falling, at the same time, far short of the
glorious millenarial visions of Sylvester II and the pilgrim/warriors of the First Crusade.
The greatest scholar of the 12th century, Albert the Great of Cologne, or Albertus Magnus,
turned to alchemy in the mid century, and produced the first original work on the subject
since the late fifth century. His treatise, On Alchemy, champions alchemy as a difficult but
true art. He does not tell us if he actually made gold, but his directions to the practitioner
indicates not only a knowledge of the triple nature of alchemy, but an awareness of the
changes in the political winds. He warns the alchemist to chose the right hour for his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl fopke.keep.pl
Aquitaine, as did most of the bishops of the western church and hundreds of knighted
nobles. Even St. Bernard, who was heard to grumble at the expense of gilding a church,
attended, compelled perhaps by an authority greater than his own ego, the power brokers
of Sion.
From its beginnings at St. Denis, the new style spread first through central France, and then
all over Europe, from England to Germany, Portugal to Northern Italy. The collection of
artists and craftsmen assembled by Abbot Suger developed into schools and guilds that
traveled throughout Europe for the next two centuries or so creating a vast collection of
Gothic churches and civic buildings. Twelve years after the good Abbot's death in 1151, his
student, the Bishop of Paris, Maurice de Sully, and his "master mason," William of Paris,
paid him the compliment of bettering his design.
On an island in the Seine, the new cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris rose slowly into the
light filled sky. Work on the choir and transepts were begun in 1163 and not completed until
1182. By the time the construction of the nave was under way, another change was
sweeping through Christendom.
Jerusalem and most of Holy Land was conquered in 1187 by the forces of the Seljuk Sultan
Saladin. The west was stunned and plans began for an immediate Crusade, the Third
according to modern historians. (The Second Crusade had been the unhappy affair
undertaken in 1147 by Louis VII, during which the Abbot Suger of St. Denis ruled France as
regent. Suger in fact did do so well with the realm's finances that Louis' disastrous crusade
hardly made a dent in the royal coffers.) In the midst of this political upheaval occurred the
Cutting of the Elm at Gisors, the schism between the Order of Our Lady of Sion and the
Knights of the Temple of Solomon. For over a decade, Sion had been building a private
power base back in Europe, and after the loss of the abbey on Mount Sion, the entire Order
relocated.
This shift began in 1152, the year after Abbot Suger's death, with Louis VII's gift to the
Order of the large priory at Orleans of St. Samson, another Dark Age saint with Merovingian
connections. By 1178, as we noted above, the Order was confirmed by the Pope in the
possession of houses and large tracts of land from the Holy Land to Spain. The Cutting of
the Elm at Gisors did more than just split the Templars off from its parent Order, it defined
the boundary line between the Plantagenets on one side, supported by the Templars, and
the Capetians on the other, supported by Sion. This division would eventually produce not
just the destruction of the Templars by the French King, Philip III and his puppet Pope,
Clement V, but the catastrophe of the Hundred Years War between France and England.
As the walls of Notre Dame de Paris rose, the foundations of the new illuminated
Christendom began to crumble. Loss of Jerusalem, and eventually the rest of Outremer,
made the universal nature of the church questionable. The Grail Romances, whose imagery
would appear in the decorations of both Notre Dame de Paris and the cathedral at Amiens,
attempted an end-run around the church itself by appealing directly to a chivalric sense of
destiny. With the failure of the Third Crusade and the subsequent strife among its leaders,
the grand plan began to falter.
The Orthodox church fought back in the so-called crusades against Christians. First, almost
by accident, Constantinople was conquered by the Fourth Crusade. This empowered Pope
Innocent III to go after the heretics in southern France. Fifty years later, with southern
France and its culture destroyed, the hope of a new kind of Christianity, once so promising,
had been lost.
* * * * *
For a century after the discoveries in the Holy Land, alchemy remained the secret preserve
of the initiates within the church. The Order of Sion and the Templars seem to have had
their own alchemical processes and their own individual codes for referring to it. Not until
the middle of the 13th century did alchemy surface in a direct and unambiguous way.
By the time the external decorations, including the magnificent bas-relief rendition of
Alchemy itself on the Great Porch of Notre Dame de Paris, were finished in 1235 the reason
for secrecy had passed. The Imperial Orthodox Church of Rome was in ascendancy with
both the Templars and the Order of Sion struggling to find a new mission. Power politics had
also stabilized, somewhat, with the Holy Roman Empire as top dog of the feudal pack. The
Middle Ages were reaching for their apogee, while falling, at the same time, far short of the
glorious millenarial visions of Sylvester II and the pilgrim/warriors of the First Crusade.
The greatest scholar of the 12th century, Albert the Great of Cologne, or Albertus Magnus,
turned to alchemy in the mid century, and produced the first original work on the subject
since the late fifth century. His treatise, On Alchemy, champions alchemy as a difficult but
true art. He does not tell us if he actually made gold, but his directions to the practitioner
indicates not only a knowledge of the triple nature of alchemy, but an awareness of the
changes in the political winds. He warns the alchemist to chose the right hour for his [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]