The Knights Templar and Freemasonry

By Sam Learmonth

The purpose of this article is to examine the arguments concerning the connections that have been made between the medieval Knights Templar and the Masonic Lodge made by a number of different groups of writers, including 'speculative Freemasons', 'anti-Masonic conservatives' and 'popular pseudo-historians' from the point of view of a professional historian.

The Order of the Knights Templar was founded circa 1118 on the authority of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem, at the request of Hugh of Payns; the mandate of the new order was the protection of pilgrims to the Holy Lands. The Order of the Temple grew to become the most powerful of the Military Orders of the Crusades due to their military prowess, the vast tracts of land they had acquired all over Europe, and their involvement in money lending and banking. But on Friday the thirteenth of October 1307 the King of France (at the time) Phillip IV 'the Fair' ordered his sergeants-at-arms to arrest the Templars in France on charges of heresy, idolatry and homosexuality. Those arrested included the Grand Master of the Order Jacques de Molay. Many of the Templars under torture confessed to a number of the charges, which caused the Pope Clement V to Order the arrest of the members of the Order all over Europe and instigate the trials that resulted in the abolition of the Order in 1312 at the Council of Vienne. The consensus among modern historians however is that the Templars were innocent of the charges against them and that the Trial of the Templars was a result of other factors, for example the desire of Phillip IV to get his hands on the wealth of the Order to help solve his financial problems. However the colourful nature of the charges and the confessions when it comes to the nature of the Templars' supposed heresy has led many to speculate.

It was during the course of the eighteenth century that the speculation regarding the nature of the Templar heresy and the possibility that the Order had somehow survived it's supposed downfall or that it's ideas had been passed on in some way really began.

The first group of writers in this period to use the Templars and their myth in their writings were a number of so called 'speculative Freemasons'. For example the German Masonic leader Baron Karl von Hund, who in the 1750's came close to controlling the whole apparatus of German Freemasonry, claimed to have discovered the secret doctrines of the Order of the Temple, which told how the Order had survived the Trials. Hund's argument for the survival of the Templars follows that before he was executed in 1314 Jacques de Molay had appointed Pierre d'Aumont his successor as Grand Master. d'Aumont and the Templars he rallied escaped capture by disguising themselves as stone masons, they travelled to Scotland (where the Order had not been abolished), where they helped found the first Masonic Lodges. Hund also argued that the Templars possessed some form of secret knowledge that they had learned from their time in the Holy Land and through excavation of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, where the Order had it's original headquarters and from where the Order derives it's name.

A second view of the survival exists within the literature of 'speculative Freemasonry' this being the view of the later eighteenth century Masonic writer Bernard Raymond Fabre-Palaprat who was a member of the Knights of the Cross (a Masonic Lodge affiliated to the French Grand Lodge). Palaprat also claimed to have found the secret doctrines of the Order of the Temple and proof of their survival beyond the fourteenth century. His argument is as follows:

That before his death in 1314 de Molay appointed Jean Marc Larmenius ('the Armenian') as his successor rather than Pierre d'Aumont as Hund argued, who then covertly rallied the remains of the Order and took them into hiding in Scotland where they helped found Freemasonry. But differently from Hund he produced evidence for his arguments, this evidence being a text called the Leviticon. The Leviticon consists of a supposedly unmodified Gospel of St. John and a document known as the Carta Transmissionis (also known as the Larmenius Charter or the Charter of Transmission) This charter was supposedly written by or on Larmenius' order and contains the constitution of the now underground Order of the Temple, and is signed by all of the Grand Masters of the Order from Larmenius to Palaprat himself. Palaprat's Lodge became highly popular, and his arguments still have their supporters today for example though they are a non-Masonic charitable organisation the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem (SMOTJ) adhere to his ideas of the survival of the Templars. But as the historian Peter Partner in his The Knights Templar and their Myth points out, the Leviticon (and the Carta Transmissionis) upon which Palaprat's ideas are based is a forgery, by the well-known forger Ledru.

In the opinion of many historians (for example Partner in Chapter 8 of The Knights Templar and their Myth) these writers were in essence attempting to use the Templars and the myth surrounding them due to their fame and the mystery surrounding their practices and the fall of the Order to glorify and add a sense of mystery to the history of their particular Masonic Lodge, in an attempt to gain power and attract new members.

Yet the 'speculative Freemasons' are not the only group to use the Templars in their writings, the connections made by the 'speculative Freemasons' between the Templars and Modern Freemasonry were used against Freemasons by their enemies. These writers, the most prominent being Abbe Augustin Barruel and Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (Purgstall being the most obviously anti-Masonic of the two) constructed a model of the history of heretical, anti-Christian and anti-societal movements which argued that these movements were all interconnected, that their heretical and dangerous ideas had been passed from one to another from the Gnostics of the third century A.D, through the Bogomiles, the Cathars and the Templars to the Freemasons and Political Radicals of the period in which they were writing. Barruel and Purgstall use the same dubious evidence and methods as the 'speculative Freemasons' had done but they used it to produce a sinister picture of the Templars and the Freemasons as demon-worshippers, Purgstall for example wrote a great deal about the entity/deity/demon (depending on your point of view) Baphomet - he argued that Baphomet was a fertility idol worshipped by the Templars in their secret rituals in the form of a mummified head, and that belief in this idol was common throughout the Order. But as Malcolm Barber points out in his The Trial of the Templars, careful study of the confessions and evidence of Templars from all over Europe shows that Baphomet is only mentioned in under ten percent of the confessions in France (and territories under French influence like Navarre and Naples), and that the name as any linguist of medieval languages will tell you is a corruption of the medieval French name for Mohammed ( Mahomet). Also with reference to the mummified head used in Templar rituals, Helen Nicholson (in her The Knights Templar: A New History) points out that it is known to have been that of Saint Euphemia.

The third group of writers who connect the Templars to the Freemasons in the their writings are the pseudo-historians of the same vein as Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. They make similar claims to the groups made above, but they tend to connect the Templars not just with Freemasons but with any and all mysteries, for example according to Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln the Templars were founded by the Secret Brotherhood of the Priure de Sion to protect the bloodline of Mary Magdalene. Their evidence for this is very dubious.

In conclusion writers like Christopher Knight and Baigent et al. may persist in writing concerning a link between the Knights Templar and the Freemasons, but in my opinion and the opinion of most historians when considering the evidence used and the motives of the 'speculative Freemasons' (as it was in their works that these ideas were born) when writing, there is no proof for the survival of the Knights Templar either as an Order in the Freemasons, or the transmission of any secret doctrine between the two. Though the lack of any real hard evidence has yet to deter the writers of the above pseudo-histories. There is however a legitimate argument that the Templars survived as active military orders in the form of the Knights of Christ (1319), formed by the Portuguese King Diniz following the Trial of the Templars in Portugal (which judged the Templars as being innocent) endowed with lands formerly held by the Templars, and with many former Templars as members, or the Order of Montessa (1324) formed under similar circumstances by James II of Aragon. Also arguably the Templars survived in the monastic orders that the former Templars not imprisoned or killed were sent to reside with.

Bibliography

M. Barber, The Trial of the Templars, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

M. Barber, The New Knighthood: A history of the Order of the Temple, (Cambridge: C.U.P, 1994).

H. Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History, (Stroud: Sutton, 2001).

P. Partner, The Knights Templar and their Myth, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

G. Napier, The Rise and Fall of the Knights Templar: The Order of the Temple, 1118-1314: A True History of Faith, Glory, Betrayal and Tragedy, (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2003).

J. Wasserman, The Templars and the Assassins: The Militia of Heaven, (Rochester VT: Inner Traditions International, 2001).

M. Baigent, R. Leigh and H. Lincoln, Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, (London: Corgi Books, 1983)