The Syon Cope.
I have become aware of the existence of this priestly liturgical vestment 10 years ago, when looking into the history of the british/norman Ferrers searching for their armorial distinctions and honours, as I was then collecting all known Arms of all families with a surname rooted in the latin verb: fero-tuli-latum-ferre, in order to prove my thesis of their common origins in the period preceding the Dark Ages, i.e., prior to 1000 A.D.
The Syon Cope was mentioned in C.Wilfrid Scott-Giles, The Romance of Heraldry , J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd., London 1929 and in W.H. ST John Hope, A Grammar of English Heraldry, Cambridge, 1953.
After unsuccessfully attempting to obtain a colour photo, I decided to have a look at it at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in the occasion of my trip to Europe in 2004
Nobody appears to have been for centuries or to be aware to-day. of the links between the Syon Cope and the Order of the Knights-Templar, which had originally been known, when founded by Geoffrey de Bouillon, as the Order of Syon.
The Cope is semicircular being worn by the Roman Catholic Priest who used it during Masses behind and around his torso, clasped in front on his breast It is embroidered to a higher standard than the Bayeux Tapestry with religious icons from the Gospels the central one of which is about the Crucifixion. It prominently shows St Peter and St. Paul and is very orthodox. However at the top of the Crucifixion there is an icon showing a Crowned Lady at the left ( of the Priest wearing the Cope with his back to us) and a blessing Glorified Jesus, similarly Crowned on the right, both sitting, looking at one another. The crowned Lady could be either Mary the mother or St. Mary Magdalene, whom some believe married Jesus and shares with him the Lordship given Him by the celestial Father Jehovah. The Lady is holding her left hand up. The border along its diameter shows 14 fairly large, easily discernible Coat of Arms a series of smaller ones filling the border of the Cope along the semi-circumference.
The 14 Arms are, beginning from the right of the Cope-: Clifford, Despencer, Order of Knights-Templar, Despencer, Clifford, Geneville, Robert Ferrers the 8th Earl of Derby (1241-1279 ) [ circular pattern of Arms ], Castile & Leon ( this dates the Cope since it commemorates the marriage of King Edward I ( 1272-1307 ) to Eleanor, the sister of Ferdinand III the King of Castile & Leon, when Spain was still not joined to Aragon and Catalonia ), Warwick, (unknown ), William Ferrers, the 5th Earl of Derby who died at Acre in ca, 1194-97 [ lozenge-shaped Arms], definitely a crusading Knight-Templar, Order of Knights-Templar, William Ferrers' lozenge-shaped Arms ( funereal perhaps ?) again, ( the same unknowmn Arms previously mentioned). Ferrers'Arms are a;so discernible among the smaller located on the circumference.
Dating shows the Cope was in use during the reign of King Edward I and the life of Robert Ferrers the 8th Earl. of Derby. It shows a link between powerful families of the Midlands and between these and the Order of the Knight-Templars. One should also note that at the time of King Edward I, although the Spanish Reconquesta had not yet begun the large and determined drive that the united Spain of Elisabeth of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon was to generate during the next century for the liberation of the Spanish territories under Islamic domination, yet Spain already constituted an alternative crusading ground and opportunity to acquire honour, wealth and indulgences for past sins if not even eternal life, for Knights from all over Europe. This is how, for example, branches of the spanish Ferrer, Ferrero, Ferrero', Ferrante, etc. originated from migrating british/norman knights from Britain, breton/norman from Brittany ( France ), british/norman from Scotland, other knights from Languedoc, Provence, etc.
The various families of the Gens Ferreria (Ferraria ) Clan, existing in most parts of western Europe, collected a total of more than 100 Coat of Arm, which may appear one day in the Book I have been writing about the Clan, a unique occurrence in the Heraldic History of Europe, certainly worthy of the Guinnes Book of Records. The best comic character ( french cartoons ) who would better and more closely portrey in a satirical mode, a typical Ferreri ( Ferrari ) knight whose fighting prowess would have been forged in the days of the gallic struggles against the Romans, would be the french Asterix ( a Breton like most Ferrarii ) with his
fat squire Obelisk.
The Book's Title sounds funny as it hints at Julius Caesar's imaginary ( probably also historically true as the Bretons from Vannes gave him tremendous problems; finally forcing him to deport the whole tribe to Venetia in Italy [ modern Veneti from Vannes], not to mention the great hero Vercingetorix ) vexation with the continuous harassment received from Asterix and Obelisk -: " Veni, vidi, vici, but when shall there be an end to these ubiquitous and pugnatious Ferrarii......?" Cool
A Short History of the Order of Knights-Templar.
( According to Sir Laurence Gardner's utterances.)
As I have mentioned in Post 6 f there may have been four branches of the messianic-related Sacred Line of the Holy Grail Kings ( S.L.H.G.K ).
The branch that is responsible for the rise and development of the Order of the Knights-Templar, was led by the Prophet Jeremiah, the son of Hilkias, a priest at Anath, who became the high priest of Jerusalem and discovered the Book of the Law ( what had existed so far of the Scriptures or Old Testament, i.e., the Pentateuch ), that had been secreted in the Temple. This migration of exalted Hebrew personalities of Holy-Grail- relevance occurred to Ireland in the days of Zedekiah the King of Judah (598-586 B.C.) who died a captive of the Babylonians, after having been blinded and witnessed all his sons being murdetred by order of Nebuchadnezzar. The history of the Phoenicians, of the Hebrews and later of the Carthaginians shows in fact commercial links between the Middle-East and North Africa to Ireland and Wales for the acquisition of Tin which was essential to the production of Bronze. Since the Age of Bronze is prior to the one of Iron, one can see the antiquity of these links.
The only survivor of the Royal Family had in fact been a daughter of Zedekiah, called Tamar . Jeremiah the Prophet, who was also the captain of Hilkiah's Temple Guards had been able to hide the Sacred Ark of the Covenant, the documents concerning all alchemical knowledge related to the use of the Ark, the Tablets of the Testimony ( I quote from Gardner-: "Inscribed on these [the stone tables received on the Mountain of Sinai by Moses] were the Tables of the Testimony ......... the Cosmic Equation-: The divine law of number, measure and weight. The mystical art of reading the inscriptions was achieved by the cryptic system of the Cabbala ". Unquote) and of all apparatus used in the manipulations of gold in order to produce mono-atomic gold-powder, etc., a great deal of the Royal Treasure ( 140 tons of precious metals ) together with other historical and religious documents under the foundations of the Temple of Solomon. Jeremiah made an accurate record of the location and formed a secret Order of the Temple which held the record in custody for 1700 years until the opportunity to go to Jerusalem and the authority to excavate the site of the Temple and to retrieve the Cache was made available by the Crusade in which took part a highly positioned member of the Order, by then called The Jerusalem Order or Order of Syon, the crusading King Geoffrey ( Godefroi ) de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, of Merovigian descent, a fact that qualified him as a member of the S.L.H.G.K. ( His ancestors had survived Charlemagne's jealousie and persecution of
all Merovingian princes ).
The reorganisation of the Order of Syon into that of the Knights-Templar had been inspired in 1099 by St. Bernard de Clairvaux, known as the Cluniac ( from Burgundy ) reformer of the Orders of the Benedectines ( founded in 529 by St. Benedict ) and of the Cistercian Monks ( founded in 1098 ). The Order of the Knights-Templar became in fact a de-facto lay-branch of the Cistercian Order, sharing the same Rule of St. Benedict modified to suit soldiers and military-technicians in so far as diet was concerned.
St. Bernard, a noble, belonged to the closed circle of the Order of Syon and knew the Temple-secrets and wished these brought to Europe.
Godefroi died in 1100 and was succeeded as King of Jerusalem by his brother Baudouin II du Bourg, who established The Order of the Templar Grand Knights of St. Andrew in 1118, also called The Guardian Princes of the Royal Secret. Other similar Orders were also founded in order to establish redundancy and survival. Europe is in good hands. Tamar married Ard Ri' ( High King of Ireland ) Eochaid, ancestor of Ugaine Mar ( Ugaine the Great ). The Irish Royal Line eventually moved to Scotland with the Sacred Stone of Scone( Jacob's Pillow ) So the irish/scottish/pictish kings considered themselves the descendants of King Zedekiah of Judah.
It appears to me that there is great potential in all these traditions, whether concrete or purely intellectual is immaterial and irrelevant ( I believe these are as true as any other similar tradition; as even Roman Catholicism and other world- religions and ethical systems contain many traditions that cannot be proved historically and are a matter of Faith, Belief, Hope and Charity [as Love/Agape' ] )in so far as these can be adopted as a psychological part in the formation of our unique identity and world-view as the western people. A psychological and morale-building framework to oppose worse ( like for example the Japanese belief that the Emperor descends from Amaratsu, the Goddess-Sun and is himself divine, or that Mohammed is the Last Prophet and the Seal of all Truth, that he ascended heaven on the back of a horse from the rock in Jerusalem etc. etc. ) to us unsatisfactory alternatives held by our opponents and competitors. China has some such framework, based on Mao Tze Tung and Confucius, India has an unlimited pantheon, Islam has it, the Russian have it, etc. The recent religion of the supermarket-material-consumeristic-prop the western masses have been adopting in their scientific mode of existence, has no endurance value at all. It is a religion of slaves which is bound to fail us when under life-and-death-threats from our opponents. The point is that to enjoy the supermarket or the pension one must not die in battle, and if there is nothing else beyond the supermarket, then dying in battle is utterly unnacceptable, all sort of rationalisations and political compromises becoming acceptable, even subjection and slavery. Very, very, very weak, Dear Watson! Since the WWII the West has in fact been loosing every military confrontation. I am not a warmonger or an imperialist, neither am I one of those weak, misguided, false, hypocritical, decadent rationalisers. These are the hypocritical, self-pampering people ( among whom the Greens excel, followed by Labour in our own Australian backyard ) who clamor and agitate to save the rat-kangaroo, the whale and the barrier-reef ( I am not saying these should not be saved ) while not giving a damn about the millions cattle and sheep ( a holocaust ) they are year after year wasting to draughts they are doing nothing to alleviate by generating NEW ENERGY and NEW WATER. They are the same people continuously deprecating the poverty of the third world nations, while also clamouring for special working conditions and remuneration that can only increase the ecomical gap between us and the others. They are the same people who keep on dishonestly de-stabilising and sabotaging our system by criticising it rather than courageously if unpopularly criticising these third world nations for their escalating demographic increases, their exploitation of women, their disregard for human rights, their retrogressive and absurd social and religious systems of belief ( i.e., Anachronistic Islamic theocratic/sharia-law and hindu's caste system obsessions, etc.) In the military field, we begin suffering from chronic diarrhoea after a loss of 2000 soldiers over a period of four years, when at Borodino' the Russians lost 80,000 men in two days, resisting Napoleon. The U.S.A. ( its Baby-Boom and Pinocchio generations ) lost the war in Vietnam because they were unable to accept losses of 10,000 a year for five years. Labour is planning to abandon Iraq and Afghanistan because we are yellow. Italy for example, in one of four escapist-Plans unashamedly contemplated by its latter-days republican and democratic military echelons ( They should be out in the fields tilling the soil, instead of donning uniforms they do not deserve, insulting the great military families of the Italian military traditon. Even in relation to the Bersaglieri Corps, founded by a piedmontese Ferrero, they even have the war-cry wrong-: Lamarmora instead of Ferreri. Jesus deliver us from the incompetent! ) is typically planning to dedicate its military organization to the service of the Pope ( I do not think the Pope is so foolish as to accept ) in order to escape more demanding military challenges in the future defence of Europe ( see Article " Farnesina modello Savoia ", l'Espresso, 8th June 2006 ). Comical? Yes, and sadly true! If they were honest, they would withdraw from membership of the European Community as they shall remain, with the wrong cowardly leadership, the soft belly of Europe.
Human beings do not live of matter and bread alone, but need higher referential witnesses, whether concrete or virtual ( intellectual ) it does not matter. In the West we are fortunate to have a vast selection of worthy, viable, lofty, highly ethical referential witnesses and ideals, the highest one being Jesus of Nazareth, whether he died celibate or he married St Mary Magdalen it does not matter a bit! Why should marriage and procreation ( In the case of Jesus and the Magdalene it would have been an ideal highly ritualised marriage ) deny the divinity, the spiritual purity of Christ? It would certainly exalt his humanity. In my opinion as a theologian, even Jesus himself never fully realised the homeostatic co-existence of his double natures in his one person until the end of his martyrdom, human doubt having been naturally strong ( see the scene at Getsemane's Garden ), as the result of the self-sacrificial nature of his mission. His whole human nature tended to be urging him to reject, rationalise, compromise his divinity out of his person. I can see all the prudish interferences from Constantinianism as the false projections onto an otherwise pure religion of the animalistic sexual mores and attitudes of depraved human beings who have remained pagan and polytheistic, who wish to camouflage their lowly natures and compromising ethics by unnecessarily and unnaturally elevated standards of human existence, predicated by the religion they pollute, and which no one of them is prepared to consistingly live by. Typical of these people, highly influential and powerful in a modern democratic system, are the Mafiosi and members of middle and far eastern religions who live their lives by using different ethical standards, one, morally strict reserved for members of their extended families and another reserved for any outsider who is simply exploitable and expendible. Thus one can see men belonging to these communities and their religious congregations actively buying or selling all manners of flesh everyday of the week, hypocritically going to religious gatherings on festive days.
One of these fellows would go to a Pub seeking to find and seduce a woman belonging to an outside community while chasing out of it any woman of his group. Middle-eastern societies are even known to employ plastic surgeons to reconstruct the virginity of their women or to indulge in unnatural sexual practices in order to preserve it. I call these double standards unworthy of the three great religions of the Books. The clerics of these should rather concentrate on the reformation and purification of their people's beliefs and practices, than in preaching wars of domination and mutual esclusivity,
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