Esoteric Coffeehouse

As with many legends, the recorded history of the Knights Templar is probably less spectacular than people’s imagination. The Templar order was one of the several military monk institutions established in the High Middle Ages, amongst which the other prominent ones were the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights. Yet it was only the Templars that captured the imagination of the West as an archetype of the secret society.

The Knights Templar were established around 1119 by Hugh de Paynes (Payns), a French knight who had participated in the First Crusade and helped in the capture of Jerusalem from the Moslems (1). To quickly recap, the First Crusade (1095-1099) was the most successful of all, as mostly French (or Franks as they were called then) knights had conquered Jerusalem, as well as several important cities in the Middle East, such as Antioch and Tripoli. Following the conquest, the Crusaders established a system of feudal states in the region, out of which the Kingdom of Jerusalem was the most important. The Crusader success created a new pilgrimage fervor in the West, with thousands of pilgrims taking the inland route through Byzantium to reach the Holy Land. When they did so, they often found themselves robbed or killed by bands of Turks and other raiders (2). It was this situation that prompted Hugh de Paynes, with eight other knights, to propose the establishment of a monk order that would actually protect the pilgrims and locals from Moslem raids. The King of Jerusalem, Baldwin II, was happy to grant this new order and actually gave them headquarters on the Holy Mount, in the captured Al-Aqsa mosque (3).

But why a monk order, and not a regular army corps? The answer is not very straightforward. It is said that Paynes was inspired by the Hospitallers, a monk order that had set up a Hospital in Jerusalem to feed and treat poor pilgrims. Yet at this stage the Hospitallers apparently were not a military order (4). The Templars were also influenced by the Cistercian movement in southern France, which was a supranational monk order which contributed to the flourishing of learning in the High Middle Ages (5). Yet, again, as all monk orders of Europe, the Cistercians were not a fighting order. An early analysis proposed that the model of the Templars might not have come from Christianity at all, but from a mysterious warlike group of Moslems called the Assassins (6). The Assassins were an Islamic warrior sect that belonged to a particular Shi’ite branch, called the Ismailis (the Moslem community had suffered a schism in the early 800s into the majoritary Sunnite and the minority Shiite). This connection is hard to establish, as the Templars and the Assassins were in opposite camps. It is perhaps safer to conclude that the Templar order, just as the Hospitaller and Teutonic knights, were products of their own age, which sought to achieve divine salvation through holy conquest. The First Crusade was led under this premise, and the Templars only continued its ethos.

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As with all major discoveries, serendipity was at play when legendary Ethiopian goat herder Kaldi first noticed the strange properties of the coffee berry. Myth has it that he observed his goats behaving strangely upon consumption of the mysterious berries: they began “dancing” around excitedly. An enterprising – and courageous – gentleman, Kaldi took it upon himself to try out the berries. As chance would have it, he did not die, but in fact became a happier man (and apparently made his wife a happier woman too!).

One cannot help to identify in this short story the hints of ancient beliefs. In fact, the story has a flavour of forgotten mystery rituals, recalling the Greek legends of Dionysus the discoverer of wine or the goat-like Pan with his invention of the reed flute.  In the absence of evidence, one can speculate  on the association with ‘goats’, frenzy, wild dances and ‘wife-pleasing’ in the little Kaldi story. The suggestion may be of an earth mystery that could easily be associated with devil worship, which in fact it was.

Another beautifully ambiguous tidbit of the Kaldi story has the goat herder, impelled by his happy wife, presenting himself with the berries to the local monk of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The monk promptly attributed the berries to the work of the devil, but in a twist, the other monks were delighted with the smell and tried it themselves¹. In this tale, the ambivalent religious use of coffee was first prefigured.

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