The Rosetta Key

Jerusalem had already been captured by the Crusaders, and these nine arrived in the city and asked to form a new military order of warrior-monks called the Templars. Yet from the very beginning their purpose seemed mysterious. They proposed to protect Christian pilgrims, but these men from Champagne initially recruited no followers and did little patrolling of the Jaffa road. Instead, they got extraordinary permission from the ruler of Jerusalem, King Baldwin II, to set up their headquarters in the El-Aqsa Mosque, on the southern end of the Temple Mount.”

“Nine newcomers get to camp on the Temple Mount?” Farhi nodded, fixing me with his one good eye. “Curious, isn’t it?”

“And what do these Templars have to do with Moses and the ark?” I asked.

“Here we come to speculation,” Farhi said. “The rumors are that they tunneled into the roots of what had been Solomon’s Temple and found . . . something. After their sojourn here, they returned to Europe, were given special status by the pope, and became the continent’s first bankers and most powerful military order. Recruits flocked to them.

They were rich beyond imagination, and kings trembled before the Templar Order. And then on one, single, terrible night—on Friday, October 13, 1309—the Templar leaders were arrested in a massive purge by the king of France. Hundreds were tortured and burned.

With them died the secrets of what they’d found in Jerusalem. So legends began: how did an obscure order of knights grow so rich and powerful so quickly?”

“You think they found the Ark?”

“No trace of it has ever been seen.”

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“Soon after,” Miriam added, “stories began to be sung of knights in search of a Holy Grail.”

“The cup of the Last Supper,” I said.

“That’s one story,” Farhi said. “But the Grail has also been described in various accounts as a cauldron, a platter, a stone, a sword, a spear, a fish, a table . . . and even a secret book.” He was watching me carefully.

“The Book of Thoth!”

“I haven’t heard it called that, until now. And yet the story you’ve told Jericho and Miriam is intriguing. The god Thoth was the precur-sor of the Greek god Hermes. Did you know that?”

“Yes, I learned that in Egypt.”

“In the legend of Parzival, finished in 1210, the hero seeks counsel from a wise old hermit named Treurizent. Do you recognize that name?”

I shook my head.

“Some scholars believe it comes from the French treble escient.” Now I felt a warm surge of excitement. “Thrice knowing! Which is what the Greek name Hermes Trismegistus means, Hermes the thrice knowing, master of all crafts, who in turn is the Egyptian god Thoth!”

“Yes. Three Times Greatest, the First Intelligence, the originator of civilization. He was the first great author, the one we Jews know as Enoch.”

“Enoch was the name my mentor in Egypt took.”

“I’m not surprised. Now, when the Templars were arrested they were accused of heresy. They were charged with obscene rituals, sex with other men, and worshipping a mysterious figure named Baphomet.

Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“He’s been portrayed as a goat-headed demon, or devil. Yet there is a curiosity about that name. If it came from Jerusalem, it could be a corruption of the Arabic word abufihamat, pronounced “bufihimat.” It means “father of wisdom.” And who could that be, to men who called themselves Knights of the Temple?” 6 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

I thought a moment. “King Solomon.”

“Yes! The connections continue. The ancient Jews also had the habit, during foreign occupation, of sometimes writing secret codes using substitution ciphers. In the Atbash cipher, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet actually represents another letter. The first letter becomes the last in the alphabet, the second letter the second-to-the-last, and so on. If you spell Baphomet in Hebrew, and then translate it using this Atbash cipher, it comes out reading sophia, the Greek word for wisdom.”

“Baphomet. Solomon. Sophia. So the knights were pledging themselves to wisdom, not to a demon?”

“That is my theory,” Farhi said modestly.

“Then why were they persecuted?”

“Because the king of France feared them and wanted their wealth.

What better way to discredit your enemies than to accuse them of blasphemy?”

“The knights may have pledged themselves to something more tangible,” Miriam said. “Did you not tell us, Ethan, that thoth is alleg-edly the origin of the English word for ‘thought’?”

“Yes.”