David Haglund asked Alan Moore:

This question contains spoilers… (view spoiler)

Alan Moore Well, in my research for that particular chapter of Voice of the Fire, ‘Limping to Jerusalem’, I’d come across the interesting fact that most of the Knights Templar, under torture mind you, confessed to worshiping ‘a head’ which they allegedly referred to as their ‘Baphomet’, a word which apparently has connections to the similar word ‘Mahomet’, meaning prophet or leader. There was also the interesting question of why that period’s Pope had given the obscure and tiny order such a lot of money, territory and support. It struck me that if their head were to be – or were believed to be – the mummified head of a mortal Jesus Christ, one never resurrected or physically ascended to Heaven, then this would at a stroke explain both the Knights’ reverence for the relic and the Pope’s willingness to pay for the continued concealment of an object which, if real, would destroy the whole basis upon which Christianity had been founded. I hadn’t heard the ‘John the Baptist’ story, but if anything it makes me suspect that my intuitions concerning the mysterious head were perhaps closer to the truth than I’d supposed, in that John the Baptist would be a good way of explaining the reverence without explaining the papal compliance, and may have made a decent makeshift cover-story.

flag