The Knights Templar

Suppressed Order, Invented Descent

First attested
1129the Latin Rule granted at the Council of Troyes, January 1129
Claimed
around 950 BCEasserted by Masonic and esoteric Templarism, from Baron von Hund's Strict Observance, founded 1751, to Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas's The Hiram Key (1996), which traces the order's secret back to Solomon's Temple

The claim runs about 2.1 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

The confessions of idol worship were extracted under torture after 13 October 1307, in a prosecution most historians attribute to Philip IV's debts to the order — so every later Templar secret descends from evidence manufactured by their creditor.

Destroyed by its royal debtor; today's Templar descent runs from 18th-century lodges, not from 1314.

Hugh de Payns and companions formed the order at Jerusalem around 1119; the Council of Troyes gave it a rule in January 1129, endorsed by Bernard of Clairvaux in De laude novae militiae. Philip IV, its debtor, had every French brother arrested on 13 October 1307. Confessions followed under torture; Clement V dissolved the order by Vox in excelso in March 1312, and Jacques de Molay burned in 1314. The Chinon parchment, found by Barbara Frale in 2001, records Clement absolving the leaders in August 1308 after they abjured heresy — reconciliation, not acquittal. The esoteric Templars are eighteenth-century: Ramsay's Oration of 1736 claimed crusader descent through the Knights of St John; von Hund's Strict Observance, founded 1751, made it Templar. Today's orders descend from those lodges, not 1314.

Light

The Rule of 1129 bound armed men to poverty, obedience and a common table, and the order built a network pilgrims trusted from London to Acre — deposits, credit, escorted roads: an institution rather than a warband.

Shadow

The confessions of idol worship were extracted under torture after October 1307, in a prosecution most historians attribute to Philip IV's debts; the myth grown from them takes any shape required — a Magdalene bloodline in 1982, a name borrowed by the 2011 Utøya killer.

Sources and verification3 sources · 2 links

Scholarship

  • Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, 1978The arrests of 13 October 1307, the confessions extracted under torture, and the dissolution of the order in 1312.
  • Peter Partner, The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth, 1982The occult Templar tradition was constructed in eighteenth-century Freemasonry — Ramsay's Oration of 1736 claimed crusader descent through the Knights of St John, and the Strict Observance from 1751 recast that descent as Templar — and is not a medieval survival.
  • Barbara Frale, The Chinon chart: Papal absolution to the last Templar, Master Jacques de Molay, 2004, Journal of Medieval History, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 109-134Frale rediscovered the Chinon parchment in the Vatican archives in 2001; it records Clement V absolving the Templar leaders at Chinon in August 1308 after their abjuration of heresy, readmitting them to communion rather than clearing the order of the charges.

Linked entries

  • Often confused withMary MagdaleneDisputed

    Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) made the Templars guardians of a Magdalene bloodline, resting on Priory of Sion papers deposited in the 1960s that Pierre Plantard later admitted composing.

  • Often confused withThe Holy GrailA modern connection

    Wolfram's Parzival calls the Grail's guardians templeise, and readers since the nineteenth century have taken them for the Knights Templar, an order suppressed in 1312. Wolfram names no order, and no Templar record mentions the Grail.

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