Last outings - Templar Cathedral

Down by the banks of the Thames, but hidden up among a maze of old buildings, lies a blocky circular edifice that looks more like a fortress than a church. This is the Templar cathedral - known by its tube stop simply as Temple - a remnant of a far away time and a mysterious order of knights who amassed a great fortune then disappeared in the span of a few mere weeks. Several centuries ago, a faltering king of some long-gone version of a European empire ordered the entire order to be gathered and tortured til they confessed to horrific heresies such as (*gasp!*) spitting on crosses. Overnight the fabulous wealth of the Knights Templar (gathered largely by requiring joining members to donate their entire personal wealth to the order) was confiscated into the French king Phillip IV's royal coffers. Conspiracy theorists attribute this power grab to the church's attempt to retake the fabled Holy Grail which was suspected to have been in the Templars' possession when they decamped from Jerusalem at the close of the last of the Crusades. I'm a firm believer in the human race's ability to happily commit atrocities of a squalidly grandiose magnitude without any motivation deeper than pure greed, so I tend toward the more mundane explanation that the massacre of the Templars was merely a financial grab by a cash-strapped king with no other more lucrative objects of plunder than the local peasantry.

Today the temple is perhaps best known as the site of the climactic scene of the film version of The Da Vinci Code, where the director cast off any moral claim to the artsy high ground when he inserted a ridiculously cheesy CGI montage of spinning planets other cosmological symbols to clue Tom Hanks' blank-eyed character into the solution to the codex that held the encrypted location of Mary Magdalene's grave. Most visitors (self grudgingly included) now arrive at the site mostly out of a sense of historical pilgrimage - even despite the ludicrous book and film made on their collective grave, the tale of the Knights Templar and their downfall is perhaps one of the most intriguing mysteries of European history...up there with the hoisting of the Stonehenge monoliths on the list of things that have never been fully explained, either the how or (more interestingly) the why. The temple has taken shrewd advantage of this sudden interest in its esoteric past, charging a few pounds per head to attend a series of lectures enumerating the parts of the novel that might be founded in actual church lore versus those that are purely located in the dark historical recesses of author Dan Brown's mind.

In any case, the inside was closed to visitors on the day that I arrived at its door, so I was left to admire the unusual architecture from the outside and note the two-knights-on-horseback effigy placed at the top of a tall column that is among the unexplained symbols employed by the Templars. Inside I could hear a choir singing - rehearsing, I suspect, since the doors were firmly locked and no visitors were allowed inside. I took a few pictures, laughed to myself at the other visitors who were comparing notes on the film's adherence to the history of the church even though I was largely there doing the same, and quietly took my leave.