Chapter 107. The Knights Templar: History, Trial and the Templar Legend

The Order of the Temple existed for less than two centuries, from a handful of knights guarding a pilgrim road to the arrests of 13 October 1307 and the burning of its last Grand Master in 1314. Its afterlife in high-degree Freemasonry, occultism, conspiracy literature and fiction has lasted far longer. The library’s sources fall into three groups. One is a sceptical historiography, represented by John Michael Greer’s encyclopedia and C. G. Addison’s 1842 history. Another holds that the Templars survived, argued by Sanford Holst and by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. A third treats the order as the carrier of a hidden doctrine with political aims, as Nesta Webster and Albert Pike do. This chapter gives each group its own voice and states its evidence.

Foundation and rise

Greer gives the standard account. “In the year 1119, nine French knights living in Jerusalem formed a religious order devoted to the protection of pilgrims.” King Baldwin II gave them “a place to live near the ruins of Solomon’s Temple,” hence the name “the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon.” Greer says that “many strange claims have been floated in recent years about the founding of the order, but it made perfect sense in the context of the time.” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Knights Templar”]. The order was poor, and “on occasion two brothers had to ride a single horse.” A letter from Hugues de Payens written around the Council of Troyes in 1128 shows it “struggling for survival.” After the council recognised it, and Bernard of Clairvaux helped draft its rule, donations poured in. By 1170 it had “nearly a thousand brother knights in the Holy Land” [Greer, #64911, “Knights Templar”].

Webster begins her chapter differently: “IN the year 1118… a band of nine French gentilshommes, led by Hugues de Payens and Godefroi de Saint-Omer” [Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, #69057, ch. III “The Templars”]. The Lévi text quoted in Pike’s Kadosh degree also gives 1118. [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, Degree XXX “Knight Kadosh”]. Greer’s 1119 follows the historians. The 1118 date passed into esoteric and conspiratorial writing.

Wealth and the “river of gold”

The sources agree that the order grew rich. Greer calls the Templars “the first international bankers in medieval Europe,” and notes that the French crown kept its treasury at the Paris Temple [Greer, #64911]. Holst argues that the vaults were usually emptier than they looked. The order’s aim was to turn the produce of “more than 870 estates” into coin and ship it east: “What they had was a flowing river of gold. It coursed from West to East.” He cites Jacques de Molay’s anger when his Paris treasurer lent King Philip 400,000 florins. [Holst, Sworn in Secret, #50535, ch. 10 “A River of Gold and Friday the 13th”]. Webster, following Funck-Brentano, turns the banking role into a political charge. Had the Templars not been suppressed, she writes, “trusts, monopolies, and ‘corners'” would have come in the fourteenth century “in a far worse form” [Webster, #69057, ch. III].

Arrests, charges and trials

Greer describes Philip IV as “perpetually short of money.” He had his “handpicked papal candidate, Clement V” elected in 1305, and rumours spread by the renegade Esquin de Floryan gave him his pretext. “At dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, in an operation that would have done credit to a modern police state,” every Templar house in France was raided and about two thousand men were imprisoned [Greer, #64911]. Holst writes that “the vast majority of men escaped.” He quotes the testimony of Bernard de Vado after torture by the inquisitors: “the flesh was burnt off my heels, two pieces of bone came away, which I present to you” [Holst, #50535, ch. 10].

Webster lists the charges brought by the Inquisitor of France. They were denial of Christ and insults to the Cross at reception, “the adoration of an idol,” omission of the words of consecration, absolution given by lay chiefs, and “unnatural vice” [Webster, #69057, ch. III]. Greer explains the idol’s name: “Baphomet” is “simply the standard medieval French mispronunciation of ‘Muhammad'”. The implication was that the Templars “had gone over to the enemy” [Greer, #64911]. The sources part ways over what the confessions are worth:

• Webster points to the seventy-two knights examined at Poitiers “without torture or pressure of any kind in the presence of the Pope himself.” She argues that torture “does not necessarily invalidate” a confession, and that matching accounts from several countries suggest a real rite. Her conclusion is that the knights were “both innocent and guilty,” with a secret doctrine kept by a few. She cites Stephen de Stapelbrugge: “there were two modes of reception, one lawful and good and the other contrary to the Faith” [Webster, #69057, ch. III].
• Greer stresses that German courts found the Templars “innocent of all charges.” Of the 2,000 men seized in France, “only 60 were actually executed” [Greer, #64911].
• Addison prints the English depositions and calls them “hearsay, these vague suspicions and monstrous improbabilities”. [Reference book: Addison, The History of the Knights Templars, the Temple Church, and the Temple].
• Holst draws on the Holyrood trial, which opened on 17 November 1309. Only two Templars were taken in all Scotland, Walter de Clifton and William de Middleton, and forty-one witnesses produced “nothing of a criminatory nature.” The caretaker of Balantrodoch said the brethren “threw off their habits and fled” [Holst, #50535, ch. 12 “Underground Railroad, Lodges and Inns”; ch. 13 “The St. Clair Barons of Roslin”].

Fifty-four relapsed Templars were burned at Paris on 12 May 1310. Clement abolished the order by the bull Vox in excelso on 22 March 1312 [Holst, #50535, ch. 12]. Greer adds that many bishops at Vienne supported the order, so Clement dissolved it “on his own authority” [Greer, #64911]. On the scaffold Molay retracted: “I disdain to seek a wretched and disgraceful existence by engrafting another lie upon the original falsehood.” He was burned that evening [Holst, #50535, ch. 12]. Holst dates this to 18 March 1314, Webster to 14 March [Webster, #69057, ch. III]. The Chinon Parchment of 17-20 August 1308 was found by Barbara Frale in 2001. On its basis she claims that Clement’s cardinals absolved Molay and the leadership [Wikipedia: Chinon Parchment].

Survival theses

Holst works from the numbers. Of “approximately 4000 brothers” only “about 500” appear in the records, so “what happened to the 3500 others?” He rejects the idea of a warning, since the Grand Master and “roughly 232 Templars” were taken at their posts. He argues instead that the network of “unmarked couriers and unheralded country houses” that had carried the river of gold became an “underground railroad” of safe houses and inns [Holst, #50535, ch. 11 “Vanished into Thin Air”; ch. 12]. He follows the St Clairs of Roslin, four miles from Balantrodoch, down to William St Clair, first Grand Master of Scotland in 1736 [Holst, #50535, ch. 13; ch. 20]. He rejects the legend that Templars won Bannockburn, citing John Barbour’s 1375 account of camp-followers with sheets for banners. He still maintains that “much better candidates for Templar-Freemason connections” exist [Holst, #50535, ch. 13]. Greer writes that Rosslyn Chapel is “no more based on the Temple of Solomon than any other Gothic church” [Greer, #64911, “Rosslyn Chapel”].

Picknett and Prince argue that the Templars’ veneration of John the Baptist “conceals something far more radical”: a Johannite heresy that ranked the Baptist above Jesus. Their evidence includes the Templar Lamb of God, which in some regions referred to John. They also cite churches dedicated to the Baptist and the parallel between the severed head of the Baphomet charge and the bodiless heads of the Grail romances. They point as well to the founding of the Grand Lodge of England on 24 June, the Baptist’s feast, and to the Johannite passage in Pike [Picknett & Prince, Misterul templierilor, #17309].

Pike’s Kadosh: Johannism, two principles, a political plot

Pike introduces the Lévi text he quotes as the words of “an enemy of the Templars.” According to it, the Johannite pontiff Theoclet initiated Hugues de Payens. The order was therefore “at its very origin devoted to the cause of opposition to the tiara of Rome and the crowns of Kings.” The passage goes on: “The Templars, like all other Secret Orders and Associations, had two doctrines, one concealed and reserved for the Masters, which was Johannism; the other public, which was the Roman Catholic.” Freemasonry accordingly took Saint John the Evangelist and Saint John the Baptist as patrons, “thus covertly proclaiming itself the child of the Kabalah and Essenism together” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXX “Knight Kadosh”].

In his own commentary Pike links the doctrine to Persia: “wherever, in the higher Degrees, the two colors white and black, are in juxtaposition, the two Principles of Zoroaster and Manes are alluded to,” as on the tessellated pavement. He rejects the idol charge: “It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol called Baphomet.” The quoted text then casts the order in political terms. “The Templars were unintelligent and therefore unsuccessful Jesuits.” “It was impossible to unfold to the people the conspiracy of the Templars against the Thrones and the Tiara,” so the accusers fell back on charges of magic. It also claims that “the secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai” [Pike, #378717, Degree XXX]. Webster quotes the same Lévi phrase, “those terrible conspirators,” in support of her own case [Webster, #69057, ch. III].

How the legend was made

Greer dates the myth closely. Until the 1730s only two views existed: that Philip destroyed the order out of greed (the view of Dante and Jean Bodin), or that the charges were true. “Abruptly, in the late 1730s,” Jacobite Masons in France, following Ramsay’s 1736 oration, presented the Templars as guardians of an ancient wisdom. The idea became central to the Scottish degrees, the Rite of Perfection and the Strict Observance (both 1754). In Greer’s words, “the evidence does seem to support” the view that “the entire Templar myth was created by Jacobite propagandists.” Further layers followed. Hammer-Purgstall’s Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum (1818) was in Greer’s view a Metternichian “strategy of disinformation.” Fabré-Palaprat’s “Charter of Larmenius” (1804) was “an eighteenth-century forgery.” Lévi’s Baphomet came in 1860, and later the OTO and the Priory of Sion [Greer, #64911, “Knights Templar”]. Webster reads the same Ordre du Temple publications of 1811 and 1831 as evidence of a living Johannite tradition [Webster, #69057, ch. III]. The Masonic line from Ramsay to the Strict Observance is taken up in the chapters on high-degree Masonry. Katherine Kurtz’s novels in the library (Temple and the Stone, #7268; Temple and the Crown, #361861) are part of the legend’s reception, not evidence.

Key points

• Greer dates the founding to 1119 and stresses the order’s poverty before Troyes (1128). Webster and the Lévi text in Pike give 1118.
• The 1307 arrests were Philip IV’s operation with Clement V’s cooperation. Greer, Holst and Addison put them down to greed; Webster defends Philip.
• Webster treats some confessions as genuine evidence of a secret inner rite. Greer and Addison stress the acquittals outside France and the hearsay quality of the depositions.
• Greer reads “Baphomet” as “Muhammad”. Pike calls Baphomet worship “absurd” but affirms a hidden Johannite doctrine.
• Holst argues that most Templars escaped through an underground network, citing the Scottish trial. He rejects the Bannockburn legend.
• Picknett and Prince argue for a Johannite secret about the relative standing of John the Baptist and Jesus.
• Greer traces the Templar-Masonic myth to Jacobite France after 1736, reshaped by Hammer-Purgstall, Fabré-Palaprat and Lévi.
• Pike links the black-and-white pavement to “the two Principles of Zoroaster and Manes.”