The Templar Code For Dummies 1st Edition

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The Scottish Legends
In 2001, Arthur Herman wrote a delightful book called How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It. Face it: Scottish people believe this is all true. And so it goes with the Templar myths of Scotland. Many legends about Scotland and the Templars exist, and certain folks believe every single one of them.

The legend goes that the Templar fleet set sail from La Rochelle and made its way around England and to the coast of Scotland, near Argyll, by some accounts. The Templars, now under threat of excommunication by the pope, needed asylum, and Scotland was the logical choice. King Robert I (“The Bruce”) was at war with England and had himself been excommunicated by the pope for murdering a Scottish nobleman in 1306. England sought to absorb Scotland, while Robert the Bruce was determined it be an independent nation.

You say Sinclair, I say Saint-Clair
The common family name that runs throughout the Scottish Templar theories is Saint-Clair, or Sinclair, and it gets very confusing, mostly because so many of them are named William or Henry (showing an almost criminal lack of family imagination). Originally from Normandy, they have been a powerful and influential clan throughout Scottish history—even Shakespeare's Macbeth features the Earl of Caithness, a Saint-Clair, as a powerful Scottish laird. Here's the breakdown:

● William "The Seemly" Saint-Clair was granted the area around Roslin in 1057.

● Henri de Saint-Clair, First Earl of Roslin, fought in the first Crusade with Godfroi de Bouillon, and with Hughes de Payens, the founder of the Knights Templar. It is also claimed that Hughes visited Roslin, Scotland, in 1126, and was given the land to build the first Templar preceptory outside of the Holy Land at Ballontrodoch, known later as Temple.

● Sir William Saint-Clair (1260-1303) was the first Baron of Roslin.

● Sir Henry Saint-Clair (?—1330), was Sir William's eldest son, and a friend of Robert the Bruce.

● Another Sir William Saint-Clair (1300—1330) was Henry's son, who was slain by the Moors in Spain in 1330 as he tried to head for the Holy Land to bury the heart of Robert the Bruce. This Sir William was married to Isabel, daughter of Malise, Earl of Strathearn, Caithness, and Orkney. It is this William Saint-Clair who is alleged by some to have been the last Grand Master of the Templars. But if he had actually been a member of the order, why did he and his brother Henry both testify in a Scottish trial against the Templars that they had heard suspicious rumors about the order's "secret" initiations?

● William and Isabel's son was another Henry Saint-Clair, First Earl of Orkney (1345-1400). It was this Henry who has been claimed to have explored Greenland and North America with the Venetian Antonio Zeno (see "Henry Saint-Clair and the Zeno Narrative," later in this chapter). He is sometimes referred to as Prince Henry I of Orkney, and is actually believed to have died in 1400 fighting the English, and not in Greenland as has been suggested.

● His son, Henry Saint-Clair, Second Earl of Orkney (1375-1422), served as Lord High Admiral, and later, Lord Chancellor, of Scotland. For a time, he was protector of the young James Stuart, who would become King James I of Scotland. It is through this connection that a supposed Templar and Masonic link is made to the Stuart line of kings and pretenders.

● Henry's son, William Saint-Clair, First Earl of Caithness, 3rd Earl of Orkney, and Baron of Roslin (1404-1480), was the builder of Rosslyn Chapel, which began in 1440.

● A later William Saint-Clair of Roslin is claimed in 1602 as the "hereditary Grand Master Mason of Scotland" by several stonemason lodges. It turns out he wasn't the best role model — he seems to have almost immediately skipped off to Ireland over an alleged affair with a local milkmaid. His son, yet another William Saint-Clair, was claimed by the stonemasons again almost 30 years later as their hereditary Grand Master, in a bit of power politics. The Masons wanted a patron with royal favor, but King Charles I declined to officially name Saint-Clair as the protector of their guild.

● And, just to add to the confusion, in 1736 one more William Saint-Clair of Roslin (17001778) was named as the first Grand Master of the Freemasons' new Grand Lodge of Scotland. He accepted the honor, and then signed away any hereditary claim to the position in favor of elected officers. Nobody gets out of a job that easily. They turned around and elected him to the position for life. Interestingly, he wasn't a Freemason when he was contacted with the offer and had to be initiated as a Mason before he could accept the job. When he died, he was the last Saint-Clair to be buried in the subterranean vaults of the chapel — so far.

Battle of Bannockburn
The legendary tale of the Templars in Scotland always leads to the story of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Robert the Bruce’s troops met King Edward Il’s advancing English forces at a stream called Bannock Burn in what was the decisive victory for the Scots in their first war of independence. The Bruce’s Scottish forces of less than 9,000 men, armed mostly with spears, were heavily outnumbered by Edward’s 2,000 men on horse and 16,000 foot soldiers. The legend goes that at a crucial point in the battle, out of the woods rode a fierce contingent of mounted Knights Templar, dressed in white, who turned the battle in Robert the Bruce’s favor and forced Edward and his troops to flee back to England. And there was much rejoicing.

It is a romantic tale, but a highly unlikely one. The Templars had not been on a major field of battle since the fall of Acre in the Holy Land in 1291; they had essentially lived quiet lives across Europe until their arrests in 1307.

Even if you believe that large numbers of Templars really were hiding out in Scotland, the battle-trained fighting men from the Holy Land were, frankly, a little long in the tooth after more than 20 years of inactivity to be donning their chainmail and riding into battle.

Of course, one variation on the tale includes the use of the Ark of the Covenant as a weapon of mass destruction. This particular legend claims that the aging knights used the secret, sacred, and divine powers contained in the Ark, which they had smuggled from Jerusalem to France, and then to Scotland, to defeat the overwhelming English army.

An account written shortly after the battle really identified these mysterious Scottish troops who came out of the woods as something of a rabble of untrained and unarmed scavengers, and not a highly trained and disciplined legendary army of warrior monks. Robert the Bruce was a master of guerilla tactics in the field and had told this motley collection of miscreants to assemble in a clearing behind the woods, hidden from the view of the English troops. They fashioned spears and made flagpoles and pennants to look like fresh troops. Then at the moment when the English were trapped between advancing Scots forces, the woods, and a creek, Robert called for this group to run screaming out of the woods to give the illusion of a flanking attack.

The trick worked, and the English fled the battlefield.
Still, believers in the Templars’ exploits at Bannockburn have their own explanation. The Templars were hiding in secret, fearing for their lives that unsympathetic Catholics would rat them out. Robert the Bruce was excommunicated and was a sharp enough leader to gratefully accept any military help he could get in his fight for Scottish independence. He was also sharp enough to know that, after the war, he would need to make nice with the Church again, so it would be pretty foolish to publicly acknowledge that he’d given safe haven to the dissolved Templars. Therefore, after the war was over, using the talents of his friend Sir William Saint-Clair (1300-1330), Freemasonry was created in Scotland as a society for the Templars to safely provide cover for their mutual protection. That’s the legend, anyway.

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Rosslyn Chapel
A little chapel just south of Edinburgh, Scotland in the little village of Roslin is ground zero in the legends of Templars in Scotland. The Collegiate Chapel of St. Matthew, better known as Rosslyn Chapel, was built as a private place of prayer and burial for wealthy families. Scotland has several of them, so from that perspective, it is not unique. It was conceived and started by William Saint-Clair (or Sinclair, depending on the source) in 1446, and was intended to be a small chapel attached to a larger structure. In fact, the old foundations to the unbuilt cathedral that was planned still lie buried in the grass outside. It took some 40 years to complete.


Figure 7-1: Rosslyn Chapel, ground zero of Templar mythology.

Inside, the chapel is a wonder of the sculptor’s art. Nearly every column, cornice and cranny of the building is carved in some decorative way. The Saint-Clairs were wealthy and spared little expense.

Over the years, literally reams of paper and ink have been spent on placing Rosslyn Chapel at the center of a dizzying array of theories about the Knights Templar and what they possessed, and perhaps buried, in its crypts. Many people are convinced that Rosslyn was built by the Templars and contains some kind of secret within its walls and carvings. And most of it starts with a burial stone in the chapel, marked “William Sinclair, Knight Templar.”

William Sinclair’s grave: A Knight Templar?
The problem is that there is precisely zero evidence that William Sinclair, Third Earl of Orkney and Baron of Roslin, was, in fact, a Knight Templar at all, or even that this is his stone. The burial marker is an old one, true, but the words Knight Templar were not added to it until the 1800s. And the burial marker itself, which depicts the carving of a knight’s sword, is small and in keeping with other markers across Scotland that were used for children, not adults. The addition of a sword to it often meant that the grave was the child of a knight. There is no real way of knowing just which of the many William Sinclairs it referred to. Those trying to make the case for the chapel being a Templar building presume it was the William who built it, but he was a pretty important Scottish Lord and would have undoubtedly been placed in the crypt in the floor, instead of the smaller area where this marker appears — if he was buried in the chapel at all.

A pagan tempte
Much is claimed about the literally thousands of carvings throughout the chapel as being “Templar,” “Masonic,” or “pagan.” Researchers have stared at the carvings of Rosslyn for centuries and imprinted on them their own interpretations. Templar theorists always concentrate on the same handful of carvings, desperate to make a Templar connection. One in particular shows a knight on a horse, and it is often claimed that there is a second knight on the horse with him, proving it to be Templar. But the actual carving clearly shows that the second figure is walking behind the horse. Worse, it is pretty clear that the carving has been altered at some point. Many scholars believe it once showed St. George slaying a dragon, and that the dragon was chipped away to make it more “Templar-esque.”

Another altered carving deals with the supposed Masonic connection to the chapel: a face, said to be the allegorical figure of the Masonic character Hiram Abiff, with a gash over his forehead, as is described in Masonic ritual. The problem is that the gash in the carving’s forehead wasn’t there until the 1800s. Prior to that, for a time, a slash was painted on in red, and before that, the figure had no “wound” at all.

Yes, there are demons and “green men” and many strange images to be found in Rosslyn Chapel, but it is by no means unique in Scotland or anywhere else in Christian countries, in terms of hundreds of carved, decorative, or allegorical figures.

The subterranean secrets
It has long been alleged that the real secrets of Rosslyn Chapel lay in its columns, crypts, or other subterranean caverns. The Apprentice Pillar, in particular, has been said to be hiding . . . something inside. The preserved head of Christ is one of the more common conjectures.

Rosslyn was built as a private chapel for the Saint-Clairs, and one of the principal uses of private chapels in the Middle Ages was for burying their dead. Anyone who has visited the larger cathedrals in Europe knows that the stone floors cover a minefield of luminary corpses. Churches, large and small, are built over a crypt (a basement used specifically for burying people). Rosslyn Chapel is no different. Periodically, the floor stones are lifted away to allow caskets to be lowered in and mourners to bid their last farewells. The last time this happened in Rosslyn Chapel was in 1778, for the burial of one of many the Saint-Clairs named William. Dozens of people descended into the vault below the floor, where they found caskets and bones from previous interments, not treasure. Of course, there are certainly other places under the floor that no one has seen for centuries.

Over the years, many claims have been made about doing deep-ground radar and ultrasound scans of Rosslyn’s floors to search for the buried treasure of the Templars. Sometimes, they have been permitted, but mostly they are not. The chapel itself is under the protection of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust, and the crypt is protected by the common law right of sepulchre, which is the doctrine that says human remains should remain undisturbed, apart from the most unusual circumstances. Scottish law would certainly frown on widespread burrowing in the basement.

We still regard these claims with skepticism. Let’s say for a moment that, buried in the vaults of Rosslyn Chapel, next to the moldering bones of the Clan Sinclair’s loved ones, are the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, or the head of Christ. These are the most sought-after relics of faith the world has ever known, eluding millions of people for centuries. Unlike Dan Brown’s Mary Magdalene/Jesus bloodline story, their discovery really would shake things up. If the Scottish authorities or the Saint-Clair/Sinclair family truly believed there was a chance of their being down there, wouldn’t they have fired up the backhoe decades ago and gone digging?

So, why Rosslyn?
We come back to why Rosslyn Chapel is the center of attention to begin with. It is no mere coincidence that the tales of the Templars fleeing to Scotland after the arrests in France in 1307 were unheard of before the late 1700s, and the reason they began then is because of the growth of Freemasonry (see Chapter 8). The evidence is very compelling that much of the lore of the Templars in Scotland came from Freemasons in the late 1700s and early 1800s who were creating mythical origins for use in their lodges. The Scottish lodges were in a philosophical battle with their English counterparts over who had the first, most authentic Masonic rituals and practices. And if the Scots could prove they were the oldest, with the most impressive historical pedigree, they’d show those uppity English Masons who was who.

The English Masons claimed they were descended from stonemasons, so the Scots manufactured a Templar origin, and the large, old, and famous Saint-Clair family was easy to add legendary feats to. Yet, when the Saint-Clairs employed Father Richard Augustine Hay to research and write the family history in the early 1700s, there was no mention of any Templar or Masonic connection to them whatsoever. The whole Scottish Templar/ Freemason legend doesn’t appear in full form until a book by a Scottish Freemason named James Burnes in 1830. The Templar claim for Rosslyn Chapel, and most of the Scottish legend, we are sorry to say, is most probably a Victorian Masonic myth.

Templars Part Deux: Return of the Living Knights
The most likely scenario as to the fate of the Templars is also the most commonly overlooked one. We were strolling through London’s Inns of Court one afternoon, after having just left the Temple Church, when we struck up a conversation with an elderly barrister on his way to his office. The topic of the Templars and their treasure came up, and he started to chuckle, as though he’d had this same conversation with every starry-eyed tourist who wandered through his neck of the woods. “Come now,” he said. “Anyone with a brain knows they went to Spain and Portugal.”

The Iberian Peninsula, made up of Spain and Portugal, was a hotbed of Templar activity long before their arrests in France. The Muslim Moors had overrun both countries, and the Christians were being pushed north and east. Refer to the map in Chapter 2 and you can easily see why there was a panic. Muslim forces were all across North Africa, squeezing westward along the edge of Constantinople, and pushing across Gibraltar into Portugal and Spain. Christian Europe stared at infidel Muslims all around the shoreline of the Mediterranean, with no one but Italy and France able to hold out.

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Portugal and the Order of Christ
Just a year after the Templars’ official formation at the Council of Troyes in 1128, Portugal came to a sobering conclusion. If the rest of Europe wanted to go to the Holy Land to fight infidels, more power to them. But the Moors were streaming in through Europe’s side porch in the west and no other countries seemed to be interested in helping. Portugal’s Queen Teresa devised a cunning plan. She turned over a large tract of land, the town of Fonte Arcada, to the new Knights Templar, if they would come and defend Portugal from the Moors.

Throughout the 1100s, the Templars had stunning success against the Muslims in Portugal, and a grateful government kept handing over larger properties to them as payment. It was a good deal — no cash out of pocket, and if the Templars built commanderies on these properties, there would always be Templar Knights around to defend the country. Their castle at Tomar today still stands and is a magnificently preserved Templar fortress (see Chapter 16).

In 1307, King Dinis of Portugal got the arrest orders for the Templars living in his realm and ignored them, at first. The order did not come from the pope, but in the form of a letter from King Phillip of France. Only when Pope Clement finally issued the arrest order did Dinis comply. Instead of turning the knights over to the Church, he conducted his own investigation of the order, and found absolutely no merit to the charges against them (which was the same result in every other country in which they were tried). The king and the Portuguese knights, however, faced a dilemma. The pope subsequently dissolved the Templar Order, so they couldn’t go on living as Templars. The king’s answer was to create a new order, the Order of Christ. Castles, chapels, farms, and other property formerly belonging to the Templars, Dinis proclaimed, had only been loaned to them, and really belonged to the Portuguese crown. After he had told the pope to go pound sand, the king simply handed the properties over to the new order.

Their prowess on the sea became legendary. Portugal’s greatest hero, Prince Henry the Navigator, in the 15th century, was a member of the order. And when the Italian Christopher Columbus got money from the Spanish king and queen to bankroll his voyage westward into uncharted waters in his search for a shortcut to the Orient, the crew he hired were Portuguese members of the Order of Christ. The sails of his ships were even decorated with what looks for all the world to be Templar crosses. (For more about the Order of Christ, see Chapter 9.)

Spain and the Order of Montesa
The Moors didn’t let bothersome things like borders hinder them, and they had advanced well into Spain by the time of the formation of the Templars. The Spanish used the tern Reconquista for their campaigns to push the Muslims back across the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Templars assisted in Spain as they did in Portugal. In return, large land grants were given to them — principally, the kingdom of Aragon was turned over to the order. By the time of their fall, the Templars had massive holdings across Spain.

When the Templars were dissolved by Pope Clement V, their property was to be handed over to the Knights Hospitaller. As in other countries outside of France, the Templars in Spain had been found innocent of wrongdoing, and it seemed startlingly unjust for them to lose their holdings. So, as in Portugal, at the request of King James II of Aragon, a new order was created in 1312, the Order of Montesa, made up of Spanish Templars located primarily in Aragon and Valencia. It remained a largely autonomous order until it was combined with other chivalric orders in Spain in 1739.

The Hospitallers
The thousands of members of the Templar order who had not been arrested, or who had been found innocent of wrongdoing, were eventually given a place to go. When Pope Clement V dissolved the Order of the Temple, members of the order were given the option of joining the Knights Hospitaller. (For more about the Hospitallers, see Chapter 9.)

Switzerland
Authors Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe’s book The Warriors and the Bankers presents a different theory about the Templars, and perhaps even their treasure. They do not point to the Templar fleet, nor do they envision a mass exodus to Scotland. Anyone who’s ever seen The Great Escape knows that the simplest way to hide 2,400 men is to put them in street clothes, and send them off walking in plain sight, preferably to Switzerland. Likewise, it makes far more sense that escaping Templars took what gold and silver that was easily transportable, divvied it up, and made their way not to the sea, where Phillip’s men would be looking, but eastward to the mountains of Switzerland.

Fascinating and compelling bits of evidence support this theory.
● The time period roughly corresponds with the founding of the states, or cantons, in Switzerland. Even the official history of the country is hazy about its origins.

● Switzerland butts up against the eastern border of France, and was, therefore, convenient for fleeing Templars to stroll into.

● If the Templars were forewarned of the arrests, it makes that much more sense that they may very well have sent their treasury toward the forbidding mountains of the Alps, instead of coastal ports where every local official could see, and report, their activities. Such reports were never made.

● There are legends in Switzerland of knights dressed in white who assisted the Swiss in fighting off foreign invaders.

● The flag of Switzerland features a Templar cross in white on a red field, just the opposite of the order’s white tunics with red crosses. Several cantons featured flags with the same motif.

● The Swiss have always been tolerant of different religions, in a way similar to the Templar behavior when dealing with the Muslims, Jews, and Cathars.

● The Templars were the bankers of Europe, inventing the concepts of international transfers of money, checking accounts, safe-deposit boxes, and other revolutionary concepts that would not appear again until Italian bankers later copied their methods. Likewise, Switzerland has been renowned for its banking prowess, combined with strict confidentiality.

A curious site to explore in Switzerland is the French-speaking village of Sion in the Valais canton. Named after the French word for Zion, the Holy Land, it seems almost tantalizingly ready-made as a Templar town.

The Greatest Templar Myths
The tales of the Templars in Scotland are just the tip of the iceberg when telling tall tales of the Templars. Here are some of the more popular ones.

Templars possessed the Ark of the Covenant
In the Book of Exodus, God tells Moses to build an ark — the sacred box that would hold the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Moses is told the exact measurements and materials to use, and after it was completed, the power it contained was so awesome that it had to be transported wrapped in a veil, animal skins, and blue cloth.

The Ark is a supremely dangerous artifact. Moses’s sons Abuhu and Nadab are struck dead by simply looking into it. Its power parts the Jordan River and burns a path through thorns and fallen trees; sparks fly from it to kill scorpions and serpents. At the Battle of Jericho, Joshua has the Ark carried around the city seven times, and its power causes the walls of the fortress to collapse.

(Of course, if you saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know all this stuff.)
According to 1 Kings 8:6-9, the Ark was placed in King Solomon’s Temple, until Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonians. It is at this point that the fate of the Ark gets lost in myth. Most historians believe it was carried off to Babylon and destroyed, but many legends abound as to its true hiding place.

A longtime tradition in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims that Prince Menelik I, who was supposed to have been the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, carried it off to Ethiopia. (The Ethiopian Orthodox Church contends that it does, indeed, have the Ark, and that it’s kept under constant guard in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum.)

A different variation on the tale is that the Templars found the Ark and took it to Ethiopia themselves. This one says that while white people were rarely seen in sub-Saharan Africa prior to the mid-1400s, the Ethiopians have a legend that a group of “fair-haired” men came to Axum and used the power of the Ark to magically raise a 78-foot-tall obelisk, the tallest solid granite object ever quarried. And, just maybe, those fair-haired men were the Templars.

Unfortunately for those who believe this tale, the obelisk was carved in the fourth century, 800 years before the Templars appeared.
Another legend involving the Templars says that the original members of the order discovered the Ark while digging under the Temple Mount in the first few years of their formation, and that a carving on a column in Chartres Cathedral in France shows the knights moving it from Jerusalem to France on a cart. The column is in what is known as the North Porch, and the Latin inscription below it enigmatically reads, “Hic Amititur Archa Cederis,” meaning “Here things take their course: Through the Ark thou shall work.” Most historians debunk this claim, saying that the carving merely shows another claimed fate of the Ark, being smuggled to Egypt during the reign of King Manasseh (2 Chronicles 33), where it was placed into the Well of Souls. Again, Indiana Jones fans take note.

And, of course, there is again the tale that it is, in reality, buried in Rosslyn Chapel’s underground vaults, after being moved there from France when the Knights were tipped off about their pending arrests. Again, there is nothing but wishful thinking going on here. No one has conclusively seen the Ark of the Covenant since King Nebuchadnezzar’s troops sacked Jerusalem in 587 b.c.

A Templar connection to the Shroud of Turin
In the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, is an artifact that has excited the world for more than 600 years, the Shroud of Turin. It is a linen cloth that appears to have been used to wrap the body of a man who had been crucified, and ghostly images appear of a man with a bearded face. In spite of almost immediate pronouncements by the Catholic Church that it was a fake, the faithful believed that the image was of Jesus, and they continue to believe this today. Chemical analysis and carbon dating techniques used in 1988 provided results that the markings were paint and that the cloth dated from about the 14th century, but those results were almost immediately called into question. The Shroud is, today, the property of the Vatican, which has always refused to declare it to be the authentic image of Christ.

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The Knights Templar are implicated in the Shroud’s history in a couple of ways:

● The Shroud was in the possession of the family of Geoffroy de Charney, Templar Preceptor of Normandy, who was burned at the stake along with Grand Master Jacques de Molay in 1314.

● Geoffroy’s nephew, Geoffri de Charney, apparently had the Shroud, and upon his death, his widow, Jeanne de Vergy, first displayed it in public in 1357.

● If the Templars had the Shroud in their possession, it is possible that it was part of the fabled treasure discovered under the Temple Mount.

It is also possible that it and the image found on it are connected to another artifact that has been said to have been in the hands of the order. Author Ian Wilson has claimed in The Shroud of Turin: Burial Cloth of Jesus? that the Templars may have found the preserved head of Jesus, and that the Shroud was used to wrap it. In which case the Shroud really would authentically reveal the face of Christ. But the Shroud depicts the whole body of a man, about 6 feet tall, and not just a head.

Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, on the other hand, believe that the Shroud, in fact, displays the face and features of none other than Jacques de Molay. They make the argument in their book The Second Messiah that the last Grand Master of the Templars was tortured before his execution, that the Shroud displays the blood of his wounds, and that the long hair and beard fit his description. Further, using the carbon dating results from a 1988 test of fabric from the Shroud, which place its origin between 1260 and 1380, the time frame fits the period of de Molay’s imprisonment and torture. They conclude that the Shroud was wrapped around de Molay after he had been brutally worked over but was still alive.

A completely different theory should interest fans of The Da Vinci Code. Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett’s book, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?, makes the claim that the image was actually a hoax created by none other than Leonardo da Vinci himself, possibly using an unknown, primitive photographic chemical process and a pinhole camera.

Templars discover America!
There is absolutely no evidence that the Templars had known about the Americas in the 13th and 14th centuries, but that hasn’t stopped the speculation that they did. Various researchers have claimed that the Templars had based much of their wealth on Aztec gold and silver. Aztec tales abounded of a “great white god” from the East who had come to bring civilization to them. But there is no archeological evidence of any European presence in the region prior to the Spanish conquistadors. And that “great white god” stuff was ancient history to the Aztecs by then. That they meant “Templars” is highly unlikely.

Authors Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins (and several others) have advanced the notion that, while the order flourished, the Templars ventured across the North Atlantic, following a similar path as the Vikings, and traded with the Native American population of northeastern Canada. After the dissolution of the order, the Templars moved to Scotland, so the legend goes, and the Saint-Clair (or Sinclair) family became their protectors. And this is where the tale of the Templars discovering America really kicks in.

Henry Saint-Clair and the Zeno Narrative
In 1396, so the legend goes, the Earl of Orkney, Henry Saint-Clair, went into partnership with a Venetian merchant family known as the Zenos. Saint-Clair is said by some to have made two trips across the North Atlantic almost a full century before Columbus. Based on a document called the Zeno Narrative, the Sinclairs and the Zenos hoped to establish colonies in the Americas, away from the influence and reach of the Catholic Church.

The Zeno Narrative is derived from letters between real brothers from Venice — Antonio, Carlo, and Nicolo Zeno — and was published anonymously in 1558. In it, a voyage is described by Nicolo Zeno in 1385 from Venice to England and Flanders, in which he claimed to have been shipwrecked on a large island called Frislanda, a mythical place complete with a mythical prince. Referred to in the narrative as Prince Zichmni, Nicolo claims to have undertaken voyages to what is presumably Greenland for him over the space of two decades. At the end of the tale, after encountering strange and exotic people and places, Prince Zichmni remains in Greenland, starting a settlement called Trin.

True believers say that Prince Zichmni is in reality the Earl of Orkney,
Henry Saint-Clair, and that the giant island nation of Frislanda is actually the smallish Orkney Island off the coast of Scotland — curious, because Nicolo described an island larger than Ireland. The Zeno Narrative comes complete with a map, but although portions of it and the narrative sort of match up with Iceland, Scotland, and other North Sea and North Atlantic geography, the glaring flaw is that the mythical Frislanda doesn’t.

Beginning in the late 1700s, a series of authors began making convoluted attempts to explain how Zichmni and Saint-Clair are one and the same. In the 1870s, a geographer named Richard Henry Major took up the Sinclair cause and the Zeno Narrative; his fiddling is the principal source of the nonsense. There had never been any suggestion in any record of the family history that Henry was an explorer of any kind, nor that he had ventured far from Orkney or Scotland at any time in his life, but that never kept a good myth down. Major took huge leaps of imagination, not to mention outright fabrication, in his mistranslation and interpretation of the narrative, forcing it to fit the Henry Saint-Clair mold.

Saint-Clairs and Sinclairs around the world were ecstatic. Here was “proof” that the Saint-Clairs, descended from the Knights Templar, builders of Rosslyn Chapel, founders of Freemasonry in Scotland, had also been the “discoverers” of America, a hundred years before that upstart Columbus.

New Zealand resident Roland Saint-Clair wrote a glowing “biography” of Henry, calling him an “Orcadian Argonaut.” Thomas Sinclair in Chicago started a “Society of Sancto-Claro” and made announcements about Henry’s fame as the “discoverer of America” as a counterpoint to the Columbian Exposition that was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus. Nevermind that, even if Henry really had sailed across the North Atlantic and established a colony at Tinn, it was Greenland, not America. Pesky details, we know. So, others have added further conjecture to the tale, claiming Saint-Clair explored into Nova Scotia, and as far south as what is now Rhode Island and Massachusetts.

The Zeno Narrative has been debunked as a hoax by scores of researchers, and it has been shown to have actually been copied from Columbus’s own descriptions, and others, of Mexico and the Caribbean islands, with some artful name changes. And the accompanying map was apparently copied from a chart made in 1539. Finally, Nicolo Zeno has been conclusively placed in Italy during the period he was supposed to have been sailing and exploring. Court records show that he was less than heroic, being convicted of embezzlement in 1396 and imprisoned for five years.

Author Andrew Sinclair today continues to cling to the story and has claimed that the mythical expedition was a secret mission of Templars, Gnostics, and Freemasons to establish a religious and military empire in the New World, with Venetian cooperation. Most historians, geologists, and archeologists place little credence in the theory. Well, okay — none, really. But there are some curious items that have been linked to the tale: the Westford Knight and the Newport Tower. And, of course, Rosslyn Chapel.

The Westford Knight
Located near the town square in Westford, Massachusetts, is a slab of rock that is purported to have been carved with the image of a Knight Templar, holding a sword and a shield. Most who have examined the rock say that it appears to have been a combination of natural erosion lines with a “punchcarving” of a sword hilt, while the shield has been painted on recently. True believers say it was placed along a popular path for tribal traffic in the late 1300s by Henry Saint-Clair’s expeditions. Archeologists say that’s nonsense. It was more than likely buried under a hillside at that time, and the sword carving was made in the 1800s by a pair of boys. The Templars themselves had not existed as an order for almost 100 years at the time of Saint-Clair’s alleged expedition, so the question is obvious: Why would anyone take the time to carve a 12th-century image of a knight on a rock when there was no real connection to them to begin with?

The Newport Tower
A little bigger and a lot more enigmatic is a round, stone tower in Newport, Rhode Island. At first glance, it certainly looks like the ruins of a medieval European tower. And without a great leap of imagination — if you believe that post-trial Templars were stomping around the New England coast three centuries before it became New England — it may even look like a round Templar church.

Of course, the Newport Tower has looked like other things to other researchers too, depending on their personal pet theory — everything from a Viking observatory, to a Portuguese or Irish signaling tower, to a 14th-century Scottish church, which would place it right up Henry Saint-Clair’s bailiwick.

Of course, like the Westford Knight, the Newport Tower is only “near” Saint-Clair’s mythical settlement in Greenland, in the same way that Miami is “near” Las Vegas, but who cares when trying to shore up a good myth? Naturally, the fable has been altered to suit the “evidence,” and enthusiastic Templar fans have claimed that Saint-Clair explored as far south as Nova Scotia and, just so he could build this tower, Rhode Island.

Unfortunately, what it looks most like is exactly what local folklore has claimed for centuries: a windmill, patterned after an almost identical structure in Chesterton, England, and built in 1675 by Rhode Island’s first governor, Benedict Arnold (not the famous Revolutionary War turncoat of the same name). Arnold was originally from the area around Chesterton, and it has long been said that he patterned the Newport windmill after the one he saw back home in his youth. Some researchers have discounted this theory, saying the Chesterton windmill hadn’t yet been constructed when Arnold was in the area, so controversy remains.

[Aboaz]

A-maize-ing Rosstyn Chapel “evidence"
It is hard to pick up a book that talks about Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel without encountering an almost breathless description of an archway decorated in carvings that “proves” the Sinclairs came to America and returned with knowledge that no one else could have had when the chapel was built in 1446. The “proof” is a decorative band of carvings that are usually described as “corn” or “maize” plants, and aloe vera — vegetation that existed at the time only in the Americas. There’s only one way that the carvings could have gotten there: Henry Saint-Clair and his Templar explorers had to have gone to America and seen them!

In Greenland? Forgive us, logic returned for a second. But again, the question arises: If you believe the Zeno Narrative, what was corn or aloe vera doing in Greenland for Henry Saint-Clair to find it there — especially given that any backyard gardener can tell you that Greenland is a lousy place for a cornfield? Of course, no one can say when those particular carvings were made, apart from the certainty that they wouldn’t have been put in until the building itself was completed. And there’s also the possibility that they are just carvings of wheat, lilies, and strawberries, in which case all of this is just huffing and puffing.

Oak Island money pit
In 1795, three young men were exploring the miniscule Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia, when they noticed a block and tackle dangling from a tree over a low spot in the ground. To them, it had all the look of an arrangement used for burying something heavy underground. So they started digging. Thus began what remains one of the most frustrating and tantalizing mysteries of the last 200 years.

Two feet down, they came across a series of flat stones, of a variety not found on the island. At 10 feet, they hit wooden planks. Certain that they were onto something big, they continued digging, only to hit more log platforms at 20 and 30 feet. Frustrated and confronted with an excavation problem far beyond their means, they left the island. But the Tale of the Pit lived on.

Several years later, a group of investors financed a return to the island and began digging again. At 90 feet, they supposedly discovered something truly enigmatic: a stone, written in a simple code that said “Forty Feet Below Two Million Pounds Are Buried.” Instead, what was found was a series of booby traps — horizontal shafts that flooded the pit with seawater, preventing further exploration until more sophisticated methods could be found.

Over the years, six men have been killed and millions of dollars have been spent attempting to excavate the Oak Island Money Pit, and the bottom has never been reached. A few tantalizing items have been retrieved — links from a gold chain, scissors, a sheet of iron, an unreadable piece of parchment. But the excavation is such a mess today from the many attempts to find the treasure that the original shaft location has been lost, and little about the accounts of what has really been found there can be believed.

Wild theories have been proposed over the years as to the source of the treasure (if there really is one down there), including the pirate Blackbeard or Captain Kidd’s respective stashes, pre-Revolutionary French or English payroll trunks, Spanish treasure, and, of course, the requisite lineup of UFO theories. One particularly convoluted and hilarious claim says that bottles sealed in mercury are buried in the pit, containing the proof that Francis Bacon actually wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. Undoubtedly, Jimmy Hoffa is down there as well.

But the one theory that continues to resurface is that it is the location of the lost treasure of the Templar fleet. The pit was alluded to in the opening minutes of the film National Treasure (2004), as a temporary location of the loot hidden by the Templars and protected by the Freemasons.

Author Steven Sora’s Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar postulates a two-fer theory — that the treasure was at one time buried in the crypt of Rosslyn Chapel, but the loyal Catholic Sinclair clan dug it up and brought it to Oak Island to keep it out of the hands of Protestant forces in 1545. (Here’s another clue for you: Nova Scotia is Latin for “New Scotland”!)

The Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute made a brief study of the pit in the 1990s, and made the pronouncement that the flooding was a natural phenomenon caused by hollow limestone cavities that permeate the island, and not from some carefully installed booby trap. But the team managed to discover little else. Enthusiasts said that an underwater video shot with a remote camera in 1971 revealed submerged trunks, tools, and human bones, but the Wood’s Hole scientists, looking at the same tape, saw only mud.

Legends, claims, and counter-claims abound, and true believers contend that the pit could have been dug only by expert engineers, like the Templars. Many companies have been organized over the years to drill and explore the pit, including one with a famous investor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (whose membership in the Freemasons, linked with the Oak Island pit, has provided heaps of fodder for conspiracy theorists). But in more than 200 years, nothing of substance has ever been found. Still, just what were all those underground platforms doing down there? (We talk about the Oak Island money pit, along with many more possible Templar treasure spots in Chapter 17.)

The Templars Survived!
We discuss some of the more modern chivalric organizations that claim some kind of connection with the medieval Templars in Chapter 9. But for them to claim a connection, there has to be something to base it on. Again, legends of the order took on a life of their own, almost immediately after their execution.

Whether it is true or not, one tale says that, after the fire had consumed the bodies of Jacques de Molay and Geoffroy de Charney, someone quietly waded into the ashes and retrieved the bones of the Grand Master. They would, so the story goes, show up again almost 500 years later.

The Larmenius Charter
Certain branches of the Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH; see Chapter 9) contend that they are the direct descendents of the original Knights Templar, and the proof they use is a document called the Carta Transmissionis, or more commonly, the Larmenius Charter. It is said to have been written in the Knights Templar codex used to encode their secret documents and banking paperwork.

The story goes that the Templar’s Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, prior to his execution in 1314, verbally handed over the succession of his office to Father Jean-Marc Larmenius, a Palestinian-born Christian who had joined the order in its final years. After the mass arrests of the Templars and their dissolution by Pope Clement V, Larmenius supposedly called together the remnants of the order at a secret meeting in 1324. At that meeting, he provided these brave, surreptitious knights with the Charter of Transmission, a document that provided a plan of succession for the survival of the order. The OSMTH has based their claim of succession on this document.

The charter (which is actually in the hands of the Freemasons and is available for inspection at Mark Masons Hall in London), is indeed written in a cipher code, and when translated, is in Latin, as one would expect a document from a 14th-century Catholic order of monks to be. But it is not in the ecclesiastical form of Latin typically found in religious documents of the period. Instead, it is polished, formal, and quite scholarly — a little too scholarly, in fact. Most serious researchers have concluded it is a forgery from the 17th or 18th century. It was written by someone with a good understanding of Templar and Masonic lore, but in the sort of Latin used in universities of the time, not medieval Latin.

The charter contains a list of signatures of the supposed successors to the position of Grand Master since Larmenius, written in their own blood. Critics have suggested that, because one in particular, Bertrand du Gueselin, was known to be illiterate, anything more than an X would have been suspicious, although he may have known how to sign his own name, or someone else may have signed it to cover the embarrassing shortcoming of illiteracy.

The document allegedly reemerged in 1804 in the hands of Dr. Bernard Raymond Fabre-Palaprat, the court doctor of Napoleon Bonaparte. In addition, Palaprat also came across a copper box that contained Templar documents with supposedly authentic seals, Jacques de Molay’s sword, and best of all, the actual charred bones of the Old Grand Master himself.

Some researchers have suggested that it was actually forged by a colleague of Dr. Fabre-Palaprat, a certain Dr. Landru. Indeed, as time wore on, Palaprat continued to “find” more items. While rooting around in a Paris bookstall, he “stumbled upon” a Greek manuscript, called the Leviticon. (Lucky guy. All we ever stumble upon in Paris bookstalls are 1960s paperbacks about mad-eyed socialists and old copies of Paris Match with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.) This book described the beliefs of the Templars as being both Gnostic and Johannite (see the “Gnostics and Johannites” sidebar in this chapter). Palaprat began to introduce the Johannite teachings of the Leviticon into the “newly revived” Order of the Temple, but most members seemed disinterested in — or offended by — the philosophy, and the Order soon split apart over the controversy.

One interesting side note of the Larmenius Charter is a passage that specifically condemns “Scotch Templars” as “deserters of the order,” and “despoilers of the dominions of the militia.” If the Larmenius Charter is genuine, it seems to rebuke the Templars who supposedly fled France for Scotland. If it is a fake, it seems to be a trump card added to denounce the Masonic Templars in Scotland in order to make this newly “revived” order seem more authentic.
You make the call.

[Aboaz]

Gnostics and Johannites
The term Gnosticism comes up a lot in modern-day speculation of the Knights Templar. Gnosticism was partly a pre-Christian concept that transformed into a full-fledged movement up through the Christian Church of the second century a.d. For the purpose of this brief explanation, we're very generic, but bear in mind that Gnosticism is a generic term that covers a wide variety of beliefs. There is no one, single Gnostic Church.

The core of Gnosticism teaches that God is infinite and incomprehensible to humans. God created the cosmos but left the smaller jobs, like the creation of Earth, to a lesser divinity, known as the Demiurge. Because God did not create Earth, but allowed a lesser and flawed divinity to do so, the world is likewise flawed. In addition, beings called Archons preside over the material world, and they are not always benevolent. In more recognizable Christian terms, the Demiurge is comparable to Satan, and the Archons are angels and demons. As a result, Gnosticism's overarching philosophy is one of dualism, that good and evil, right and wrong, light and darkness, are in constant battle for supremacy on Earth.

For Christian Gnostics, Christ is seen as an emissary from God, who possessed esoteric knowledge and passed it on to a select few. One of the most pervasive themes running through Gnosticism is that it's almost a kind of secret society itself — a very few, learned adepts have the inner knowledge of how to eventually escape the evil world of the Demiurge. It cannot be studied or learned. It is knowledge of true enlightenment that can only come from divine revelation to the individual — hardly the far more inclusive message of Christianity. For this reason — and others — Gnosticism came into conflict with the Catholic Church on many occasions. (We talk more about Gnosticism in Chapter 14.)

Johannites were a particular sect of Gnostics who rejected the belief that Christ was the Messiah. They believed that John the Baptist, not Jesus, was sent by God with esoteric knowledge of redemption, and they defended this belief by saying that John was performing baptisms before the beginning of Christ's ministry. Some claimed that Jesus could not (and, indeed, did not) perform any miracles until after John was killed, when he inherited John's special powers. Others simply regarded Jesus as a heretic and a pretender, while John was the true Son of God.

Because the biblical account of John's death concerns his beheading by King Herod, no shortage of relics attributed to John are floating around the Holy Land. No fewer than three heads around the world are venerated as John's, and a veritable bone pile of hands, arms, and skull pieces are in Egypt, Rome, Syria, Turkey, and England. It should not be surprising that the Templars were reputed to have been in possession of a head of John, and many have claimed that they were Johannites because of it. The south of France was a home for a large percentage of Templars, and they were sympathetic to this popular local heresy. Tales during the trials in France were told of the Templars worshiping a head, and by embellishing the charge to make it the head of John the Baptist, the accusation became just that much more believable. Such claims have never been substantiated.

In this same French hotbed of heresy, the most prominent sect of Gnostics was called the Cathars. They were very much in sympathy with the Johannites. The Cathars' principal stomping ground was the region of southwestern France, Toulouse and the Midi, smack-dab in Templar territory. The Catholic Church undertook a 20- year military campaign to wipe out the Cathars between 1209 and 1229, called the Albigensian

Crusade. Like the Templars, the Cathars came to their end by fire — the Inquisition burned them as heretics, with the last executions ending almost a century later. It should be noted that the Templars, although well represented in the Languedoc countryside, refused to take part in the persecution and destruction of the Cathars. Curiously, like the Templars, a legend has long circulated that the Cathars had a treasure that was secretly smuggled out of the area from their last stand at Montsegur. Some versions of the story say it was the Holy Grail.

Several modern speculative books regard the document as legitimate, and use it to bolster some of their theories, as in Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas’s The Second Messiah and Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s The Templar Revelation. Other respected researchers in medieval history, and the Templars in particular, regard it as drivel and a forgery.

The Priory of Sion
We discuss the Priory of Sion in conjunction with the legend of Rennes le Chateau in Chapter 11, but we briefly mention it here as well.

The legend goes that the Prieure de Sion was a secret society founded in 11th-century France to preserve the secret of Christ’s alleged marriage to Mary Magdalene, as well as the bloodline of their descendants (see Part IV of this book for the various windings of this story). Where the Templars enter the tale is the theory that the order was created as a military arm of the Priory. Dan Brown alleges in The Da Vinci Code that the Priory of Sion was a real organization, but most researchers agree that it is a modern-day hoax, started in the 1950s.

Rex Deus
Latin for “King God,” Rex Deus is purportedly a European branch of royalty descended from the biblical King David and High Priest Aaron of ancient Israel, who have somehow managed to trace and preserve their bloodline for almost three millennia. A variation on the Priory of Sion theme, Rex Deus members are supposedly the keepers of the true secret knowledge of Judaism and Christianity.

They’re connected to the Templars by an allegation that Rex Deus directed the order to excavate the Temple Mount, where they discovered the treasure of Solomon’s Temple. They knew where to tell them to look, of course, because their relatives buried it there to begin with. Of course, famous international kook David Icke has a different variation on this ancient royal bloodline idea. He believes they are actually shape-shifting alien reptile-humanoids, and every powerful figure — from George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II to the Rothschild banking family — regularly feasts on rodents when no one is looking.

Templars spawn the modern-day conspiracy theory
The Templars were implicated in the beginning of the modern conspiracy-theory movement, and it happened at the end of the French Revolution. Whereas the American Revolution was essentially decided on the battlefield, the French Revolution limped to an end by running out of citizens to kill. The French had started by seeking to replace the notion of the divine rights of kings and popes with freedom and the rule of law. But within a very short period of time, the wholesale carnage inflicted on France by its successive waves of revolutionaries led more and more people to the guillotine. Legend tells us that they killed aristocrats. The fact is that they killed everybody — pathetic and dispossessed prisoners, priests and nuns, the middle class, opposition politicians, and anyone whose name began with the letter d. Eventually, of course, they ran out of victims and started killing one another.

When the blood stopped flowing and the dust settled, France was in ruins. The shame of the survivors over what had happened during the Terror sent them looking for someone left alive to blame, and they settled variously on the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and, somewhat inexplicably, the Templars.

In 1791, a man named Cadet de Gassicourt wrote a book called The Tomb of Jacques Molay, in which he described a secret plan by the surviving Grand Master to exact revenge against the French monarchy and the Catholic Church, and the Revolution was the culmination of the plot. De Gassicourt’s theory was that the Templars had done just what the Scottish Masons were claiming in the late 1700s — they had gone underground and resurfaced as the Freemasons. He contended that a small core of just eight members of an inner circle of Templars/Masons sparked the Revolution.

In 1797, John Robison, a Scottish inventor (of, among other items, the siren) penned Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies in which he blamed the Freemasons of France and a small, long-defunct group called the Bavarian Illuminati for the Revolution. Strangely, Robison was a Freemason himself. He wrote the book specifically to point out the differences between what went on in sane and noble British lodges, versus the radical nutcase Jacobin Masonic lodges on the Continent. Unfortunately, Robison’s motives were lost on a Frenchman seeking refuge in England named Abbe Augustin Barruel.

Barruel was a former Jesuit priest and an abbot, and between 1797 and 1798 he published a massive four-part tome called Memoirs: Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. The book was a raging success all across Europe, and was one of the most widely read books of the 19th century. In it, Barruel carefully laid out a massive conspiracy of Freemasons, the Illuminati, and the French Philosophes (a group of 18th-century French Enlightenment intellectuals). Of course, those he implicated were influenced by — you guessed it — a rogue’s gallery of anti-Catholic Gnostics, Cathars, Martinists, and the Knights Templar.

No matter how methodical and detailed Barruel’s memoirs may have been, he was factually incorrect when it came to pointing fingers at the men he believed were the Masons who caused the French Revolution. But facts never got in the way of a good conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, his book is still often quoted today as a reputable source by modern conspiracy theorists who believe that the Freemasons and the Illuminati somehow control the world, and that, somehow, it all started with the Templars.

[Aboaz]

Chapter 8
"Born in Blood": Freemasonry and the Templars

In This Chapter
● Understanding the Masonic fraternity
● Discovering possible Templar origins of Freemasonry
● Connecting the Templars, the Freemasons, and Rosslyn Chapel
● Investigating the modern Masonic Knights Templar

A hundred years ago, 1 out of every 4 American men was a member of some kind of fraternal organization, and 1 out of every 25 was a Freemason. Chances are pretty good that someone in your own family’s recent past was a Mason.

No modern organization is more commonly tied to the Templars — by serious historians, conspiracy hucksters, and starry-eyed wishful thinkers — than the Masons. Freemasonry is the oldest and largest men’s fraternity in the world. It may also be the least-secret “secret society” that has ever existed. The name comes from the group’s own legendary origins — from the trade guilds in the Middle Ages that built the Gothic cathedrals and castles of Europe. The fraternity today uses stonemasons’ tools and symbolism in its ceremonies (for example, the square and compasses that have become an identifying “logo” for the group).

For at least 270 years, it has been rumored that Freemasonry may have actually been a direct descendant of the original Knights Templar. The idea first popped up in the 1730s in France. Not long after that, a new group within the Masons began to appear, calling itself the Knights Templar. In 1919, a youth group for boys was started, sponsored by the Freemasons and named after Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Order, who was burned at the stake in 1314. There’s no denying that the Freemasons don’t mind being associated with the Templars.

Compasses: They always travel in pairs
If you took math in the United States, your teacher probably referred to that little device that helps you measure and draw circles as a "compass." We've got news for you: Your teacher was wrong. A compass is that little gadget you can use to figure out which direction you're going (if your car's overhead console doesn't already tell you). A pair of compasses, or just compasses, are what you use to measure circles (and what stonemasons use in their work). If you think of a pair of scissors, pants, or trousers, it'll make sense: You never say, "scissor," "pant" or "trouser" — it's always plural.

In 1989, a historian named John J. Robinson wrote a book called Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, which popularized the concept of the Templars being the source of Freemasonry’s beginnings as a secret society. Born in Blood was a huge hit among Masons but also resulted in an influx of new members who were fascinated by Robinson’s tales of the Templars, Solomon’s Temple, symbolism, and secrecy — and their possible connection to Masonry. Robinson’s book was followed by many others that expanded the premise.

In this chapter, we explain who the Freemasons are, how they developed, and what they do. We fill you in on what the modern Masonic Knights Templar are up to these days. And we reveal the Templar theories of the formation of Freemasonry as a secret society.

For much greater detail about the Freemasons, see Freemasons For Dummies, by Christopher Hodapp (Wiley).

The Masonic Fraternity: Who Freemasons Are and What They Believe
The generally accepted origin of modern Freemasonry is believed to have been from stonemason guilds formed during the Middle Ages in Scotland, England, and France. As early as the eighth century, French Masons were being organized and instructed by the Frankish king Charles Martel. The earliest English documents claim that a guild of masons was chartered in the city of York in A.D. 926 by Athelstan, the first king of a united England.

The first written records of the stonemason guilds appear in the 1300s with a document known today as the Regius Manuscript.
The modern philosophical and fraternal organization that exists today evolved in the late 1600s in England during the Age of Enlightenment. The fraternity was officially established in its present form in London in 1717. It is nonsectarian and open to all men who profess a belief in a Supreme Being. In addition, it draws its members from virtually every faith and every class of society, with no religious, social, or economic barriers.

The most basic level of what is called Ancient Craft Freemasonry initiates and advances its members through three ritual ceremonies, called degrees. (The phrase, “Give him the third degree” is a somewhat cheesy reference to the Freemasons.) These three degrees are conferred in Masonic lodges that can be found in nearly every town across the United States and Canada, and in almost every country of the world. For symbolic purposes, these individual local lodges are referred to as craft lodges or, in the United States, blue lodges, probably emblematic of the “canopy of heaven” referred to in the rituals.

The term lodge can refer not just to the room in which the members meet, but more correctly, to the members themselves, as a group.
The fraternity teaches its members symbolic lessons about character building, using tools, language, and allegories based on the construction of King Solomon’s Temple. The goal of Freemasonry is to make good men into better and more responsible ones. By improving individual men, Freemasonry hopes to improve society as a whole. Freemasonry’s most visible accomplishments are the many charities supported by the fraternity, but that is only a small part of the fraternity’s attraction for millions of men.

The principal thread that runs throughout the three degree rituals is the symbolism of Solomon’s Temple, culminating in the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, a widow’s son, who was the Grand Architect of the building of the temple. In the Masonic story, Hiram Abiff is attacked by three workmen who want the secrets of the master masons but have not earned them. Hiram chooses to die rather than break his word by revealing the secrets.

During the 1950s, there were around 7 million Freemasons worldwide, and more than 4 million in the United States alone, driven by unprecedented membership gains after World War II. By 2006, those numbers had dwindled to less than 3 million worldwide, with slightly fewer than 1.5 million Masons in the United States. Freemasonry is, by tradition, a male-only organization, although there are women’s auxiliary organizations within mainstream Freemasonry, as well as female and mixed-gender Masonic lodges that operate outside of the accepted mainstream Masonic world. It’s unknown where the term Freemason comes from. Some historians say that it refers to the fact that the members of the stonemason guilds were not required to stay in a certain city or county, so were free to travel and look for work — thus, free masons. Another is that it may be a shortening of the term freestone mason. Freestone is a generic term for a soft, fine-grained stone that can be carved, like sandstone or limestone (as opposed to harder rock with heavy grain, like granite, that has to be split).

[Aboaz]

A quick tour of Masonic history
Bear with this section, because it’s important to understand who the Masons are and what some of their beliefs and practices are before delving into why some researchers think they may have sprouted from the Templars.

Freemasons today use the terms operative and speculative to describe the “difference between the two distinct periods of Freemasonry. Operative Freemasonry refers to the time before 1700 — the period when Freemasons were really working with stones, chisels, and hammers. After the operative workers began to be replaced by “admitted” or “gentleman” masons, the order evolved into a philosophical, fraternal, and charitable organization, and became known as speculative Freemasonry.

Operative Freemasonry
The medieval Freemasons built Gothic cathedrals and castles from massive stones. They were masters of the science of geometry and could transform a small drawing into an enormous structure. They were skilled at architecture, physics, hydraulics, and art. Their techniques were jealously guarded trade secrets — secrets not even divulged to the clerics and kings who employed the masons. The guilds developed to train workers in these skills and enforce a code of high standards, along with setting a fair price for their work. They truly were the first labor unions.

Most important, the guilds were established to protect these highly prized trade secrets. A Mason in possession of the right knowledge could travel and work all over the country, wherever the guild was working. Master Masons were taught the Master’s word and grip, secret methods these workmen used to recognize each other. It was a simple way to quickly identify oneself as a trained member of the guild, because the idea of business cards, diplomas, and dues cards hadn’t been invented yet.

Masons established lodges, which were huts or cabins next to their job sites. This was where plans for the job were kept and consulted, training sessions were held, and meals were shared; sometimes they even slept there. Over the centuries, they developed ceremonies to initiate and instruct their new members, or to graduate their master craftsmen. The Masons claimed a mythical origin dating back to the great building projects of the Bible — the Tower of Babel, Noah’s Ark, and especially the Temple of Solomon. This is obviously where the inklings of a connection between Freemasonry and the Templars began, because both had a legendary connection to the Temple of Solomon.

The Masons held a unique position in society. True, they were peasants, but they were very skilled peasants. Kings and popes and lords and bishops all needed their services, and needed them in a big way. All over Europe, they were admired both for their expertise and their moral code. In addition, these were very religious times, and the Masons claimed that their practices and heritage dated back to events described in the Bible. The skills they possessed were considered to be both magical and divine, given to the biblical Masons by God himself, and passed down through the ages.

Understanding what Freemasonry became requires a brief understanding of the forces that shaped it. With the dawn of the Renaissance, the Catholic Church was faced with a noisy call for reform on the one side and open revolt on the other. Catholicism was losing its once total grip on the nations of the West, and the 1500s and 1600s were marked by a long, bloody series of religious wars that affected every country of Europe. Cooler heads knew religious wars were a messy way to change society.

The Age of Enlightenment, which began in the 1700’s, is sometimes called the Age of Reason, and it’s important because it ushered in revolutionary ideas about philosophy, thought, learning, and religion. Enlightenment scholars valued the process of acquiring new knowledge, instead of rooting around in dusty manuscripts looking for ancient wisdom, or looking to religion as the explanation for everything. It was during this time that the modern scientific method of experimentation, observation, and reason developed. A scientific conclusion had to be observable, measurable, and provable.

Meanwhile, a curious change began to happen to Freemasonry, beginning in Scotland in the 1600s. Noblemen began to express interest in becoming members of the Masons’ lodges. They had no uncontrollable urge to crawl in the dirt with the peasants and learn to do something more useful than boss around their serfs. Yet, records began to appear showing lodges admitting these nonoperative, “accepted” members. The first recorded instance of such a member being admitted to an operative lodge was Sir Robert Moray in 1640. Moray would go on to help found the exclusive Royal Society in London after the civil wars ended in the 1660s, with a fellow accepted Mason, Elias Ashmole. Masonic lodges were suddenly becoming attractive for some very learned men.

Speculative Freemasonry
Gothic architecture died out as the favored style by clerics and kings by the end of the 1500s, and the stonemasons lost their primary source of work. The Great London Fire in 1666 had provided plenty of opportunities to construct grand, new buildings, but it was a different style. Bricks replaced massive stones as the major building material, and the operative Freemasons (see the preceding section) were out of a job. But as the members who actually worked with stone in the building trade began to drift away from the guilds, shopkeepers, other tradesmen, gentlemen (educated, upper-class men), and even members of the nobility were replacing them. Instead of meeting in lodges on job sites, they began to gather in more comfortable and convenient taverns and coffeehouses.

No one can make a definitive answer as to why stonemason guilds turned, virtually overnight, into dining and drinking clubs, basing their organization, symbolism, and initiatory ritual ceremonies on the old trade guilds. No one really knows how or why it happened, but it did.

A meeting was held in London in 1717 to forge a new governing body for this new kind of Freemasonry. There were four lodges left in the general vicinity of St. Paul’s Cathedral, so the lodges all gathered at the Goose and Gridiron tavern to form what they called a Grand Lodge. The Grand Lodge’s role would be to make up rules for the governing of the organization and issue charters for new lodges. While speculative Freemasonry had been growing across England, Scotland, and Ireland, this was the first time that a central authority had ever been established to unite the individual lodges under one collective roof.

Grand Lodges soon began appearing in Scotland, France, and other countries, and Freemasonry quickly spread around the world on the trading and military ships of the colonial nations of Europe. In less than a hundred years, speculative Freemasons were in every civilized nation of the world.

[Aboaz]

The brotherhood code of the lodge
Freemasons refer to each other as brothers, and one of the principal obligations of a Mason is to help other Masons and their families. In fact, Masons have what is called the Grand Hailing Sign of Distress, which is a phrase and a special gesture used to signal other Masons when they’re in danger.

Freemasonry has long been tagged with the label of being a “secret society,” usually accompanied by a reference to occult practices and funny handshakes. In North America, Masonic lodges are listed in the phone book and often have signs in their yards big enough to spot from low earth orbit. U.S. Masons themselves wear rings, jackets, hats, and ties with Masonic symbols on them, and their cars often have Masonic license plates or bumper stickers. This is hardly the behavior of a secret society.

In the United States, Freemasons proudly point to the participation of early Freemasons who were Founding Fathers and other notable figures, including: George Washington and 13 other presidents, Ben Franklin, Paul Revere, John Hancock, plus military heroes, business leaders, inventors, movie stars, and more.

Outside of North America, Freemasonry is a little quieter. Many societies have a deep suspicion of Masons, believing them to be part of a mysterious cabal of men who seek to control governments, businesses, criminal empires, or worse. As a result, Freemasons in many countries do not outwardly display Masonic symbols, and keep their membership very quiet. Masonic lodge buildings in other countries are often not identified as such, to avoid vandalism or outright attack.

Non-Masons, anti-Masons, and conspiracy theorists have inflated the notion of Masonic secrecy into something evil, unethical, and perhaps even illegal. The truth is that Masonic secrecy is actually confined to very few subjects:

● Grips (those funny handshakes), passwords, signs, and steps: These are known as modes of recognition, and they’re used by Masons to identify each other and to verify their membership.

● Certain portions of the rituals, especially the 3rd degree Master Mason ceremony: What good is an initiation if you tell everyone about it ahead of time? Masons promise not to write, print, stamp, stain, cut, carve, hew, mark, or engrave any of their ritual secrets in a manner that non-Masons may read.

● Information privately exchanged between individual members (known as on the square), with the exception of murder, treason, or illegal activities that conflict with a person’s duty to God, his country, his neighbor, or himself: Masons are taught to be discreet, but they certainly don’t protect criminals in their midst. Keeping a secret between Masonic brothers is more of a demonstration of a member’s ability to honor his promise to his brethren. Although in their obligations (oaths), Masons agree to suffer dire and bloody penalties if they break the rules, the truth is, the worst punishment a Mason has to endure is having his membership revoked.

Identifying the Possible Templar Origins of Freemasonry
There is another version of the creation of Freemasonry (beyond the one we outline in “A quick tour of Masonic history,” earlier in this chapter).

Well, there are several, but one of the most popular, romantic versions is the formation of Freemasonry by a band of Knights Templar.
In 1989, the author John J. Robinson wrote a book entitled Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, which took the Masonic world by storm. In it, Robinson assembled a series of theories that traced the Knights Templar from their arrest and suppression in France to Scotland. Robinson did not claim to have come up with this connection on his own, but he was the first to make an attempt to prove it.

The Templars already had extensive holdings in Scotland before their suppression, and although there was a brief trial of just two Templars in Scotland, the order there was found innocent of any wrongdoing or heresy.

The story goes that Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland during this period, was already excommunicated by the pope in 1306, which meant that the rest of the country suffered the same fate with him. That meant no Catholic weddings, no Catholic christenings, no burial services, and no Communion on Sunday. The king was in the midst of a war with England at the time, and such saber rattling from faraway Rome didn’t bother him nearly as much as real swordplay and a relentless series of invasions led by England’s Edward I. So when the Templar fleet arrived off the coast of Scotland looking for a refuge from France, Bruce was grateful to have them.

Because Scotland was under an order of excommunication when Pope Clement V issued heresy charges against the Templars, Bruce had a spiritual loophole that allowed him to give them sanctuary. If Scotland was excommunicated, no member of the Catholic Church could read out the charges against the knights — and if no charges could be read out, then the knights were free to call Scotland home.

The biggest part of the legend has to do with the famous Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Robert the Bruce was engaged in a battle with England’s King Edward II, who ascended the throne in 1307, the year the Knights templar were arrested. The tale is told of a mysterious group of fierce knights on horseback, dressed in white tunics, who turned the battle decisively in Scotland’s favor. No evidence or contemporary account of the battle exists, but these mysterious knights have often been rumored to be the Knights Templar.

Robinson lists several Masonic references that may have originated with the Knights Templar to bolster his theory:

Passwords:
The Templars were on the run and had to hide from loyal Catholics who might otherwise betray them, so they needed to establish secret passwords and other modes of recognition.

Aprons:
According to some claims, the Templars wore a sheepskin “girdle” around their waists as a symbol of chastity, and it’s possible this developed into the aprons that Freemasons wear during their meetings. However, there is no historical record that the Templars did any such thing. They wore a cord around their waists, not a girdle or apron.

Nonsectarian discussions:
The Templars considered themselves to be devout Catholics whom the Church had betrayed, so discussion of Catholicism would have been a social faux pas, as well as potentially deadly if a devoted parishioner discovered the Templars’ secret identity. Members of their new inner circle would only have to profess a belief in God, not align themselves with the Church.

● Unprecedented religious tolerance: This goes hand in glove with the nonsectarian discussions. The notion has long been that the Templars had come to a new kind of religious tolerance after their years in the Holy Land (a sort of “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” theory of survival), and that they were amenable to allowing Jews and Muslims to worship as they wished, even inside of Templar chapels. The theory is that this laid the groundwork for Masonic tolerance of all monotheistic religions.

● Possible French origins of Masonic words and phrases: Because the Templars were a French order that spoke French in their daily activities, Robinson gives possible French origins to many unusual words associated with Freemasonry. Of course, the French-speaking Normans had conquered England in 1066, and there were constant friendly contacts between Scotland and France in subsequent years, so similarity of words is hardly surprising.

● The similarity between the square and compasses and the Seal of Solomon: The symbol for Freemasonry and the symbol attributed to King Solomon and the Temple are similar, and it can be argued that the Masonic “logo” is a thinly veiled copy (see the nearby sidebar, “The square and compasses and the Seal of Solomon”).

Most historians, Masonic and otherwise, discount Robinson’s theories, and even the present-day Knights Templar order of Freemasons does not claim a direct link to the original knights. Nevertheless, Robinson brings up interesting possibilities and more than a few unanswered coincidences. There are similarities and plausible arguments to be made that may, indeed, connect Freemasons with the Templars, and there is no denying that operative Freemasonry first began to change into speculative Freemasonry in Scotland.

[Aboaz]

Rosslyn Chapel and the Masons
Templar enthusiasts and Freemasons have long claimed that Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, Scotland, is chock-full of symbolism for both the Templars and the Freemasons. The writing teams of Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins were among the first authors to publicize and explore the chapel’s potential connections to the Templars, the Freemasons, and a host of other speculative theories. Many more researchers have followed in their footsteps. We talk about Rosslyn Chapel throughout this book but for the sake of this part of the story, you just need to know a little bit about the chapel made world-famous by the end scenes of The Da Vinci Code.

The square and compasses and the Seal of Solomon
The symbol of the square and compasses (shown on the left in the nearby figure) has become synonymous with Freemasonry. They are tools of the building trades, which use them in the everyday application of geometry.


In North America, the letter G commonly appears in the center. Because the earliest stonemasons believed that the secret knowledge of geometry was a gift to them by God, and that God himself was believed to the Grand Architect of the Universe, the G stands for both Godand geometry. Elsewhere in the world, the G rarely appears in the square-and-compasses symbol.

Some scholars have pointed out the similarity of the symbol's basic outline with the Seal of Solomon, or Star of David (shown on the right in the figure). Today, the Seal of Solomon is most commonly associated with the Jewish faith and the flag of the State of Israel. Jewish legends claim that King David had a shield with the symbol that protected him from evil. His son, King Solomon, had the symbol on a signet ring that came from heaven, which he used to perform magic and control demons.

The symbol, made of two triangles, has had many interpretations to Jews, Christians, Muslims, and alchemists. In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown declared the symbol to be a representation of the masculine and the divine feminine, and many believe it represent good and evil, heaven and earth, and other similar yin-yang themes.

Although the symbol of two inverted triangles appears in some Egyptian archeological locations, the actual symbol itself didn't become identified with the Jews or King Solomon until the 1300s in Prague, and didn't become widespread until the 1600s. It actually appeared more commonly in Islamic art during the time of the Crusades.

When, in the 1400s, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent undertook major renovations of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem where Solomon's Temple once stood, he built new city walls and decorated them with the Seal of Solomon as a talisman to protect the city. Because of the Seal of Solomon's connection to the Holy City of Jerusalem and King Solomon, some have claimed that its blatant similarity to the Masonic square and compasses shows a direct progression from the Knights Templar to the Freemasons.

Meanwhile, the square and compasses appear in Christian art and alchemical books all throughout the Middle Ages as symbols of geometry and knowledge, and often are depicted in the hands of God.

The chapel was built in the 1400s by Sir William St. Clair (or Sinclair, depending on the source). The St. Clairs were a noble family descended from Norman knights from France. Historians don’t know when the chapel became associated with either the Templars or Freemasonry, but the connection doesn’t seem to have been discussed prior to the late 1700s, in spite of outlandish claims to the contrary. The chapel was built as a private church for the St. Clair family, and its construction wasn’t started until more than 130 years after the Templars were dissolved. Nevertheless, what makes the chapel unique are the unusual carvings and artwork that are packed into every conceivable crevice.

Masonic carvings?
Among the carvings in Rosslyn Chapel are images supposedly of the Templars. One such carving is said to show the classic image of the Order — two knights on horseback, although it looks to most people more like a mounted knight with a squire, a monk, or perhaps his wife walking behind him.

Another carving is said to depict a Masonic Entered Apprentice prepared as modern initiates are today, with a blindfold (called a hoodwink) and a noose (referred to as a cable tow) around his neck. He appears to be situated between two pillars, perhaps with an open Bible in his hand. Of course, it could also be a figure of a man about to be executed — that’s the funny thing about symbolism. If it is, indeed, a Masonic reference, it should be pointed out that the introduction of the hoodwink and cable tow into Freemasonry’s rituals did not occur until the late 1600s. The chapel was built two centuries before that.

As Robert Cooper has pointed out in his 2006 book The Rosslyn Hoax, the chapel itself was dedicated to St. Matthew. Matthew 15:12-14 may be a clue to the carving’s real origin: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

Freemasonry is loaded with symbolism. Squares, compasses, plumbs, levels, anchors, arks, gavels, trowels, aprons, and a hundred other images play a part in the ritual ceremonies of the Masonic fraternity. In spite of the many claims that Rosslyn is “loaded” with Masonic symbolism, it is not. In fact, it is fair to say that there are no images that are specific to Freemasonry anywhere in the tiny chapel’s thousands of intricate carvings. No matter how many books and experts claim to see Masonic imagery in Rosslyn Chapel, it is wishful thinking.

The Apprentice Pittar
Central to the chapel’s Masonic folklore is the Apprentice Pillar, a magnificently detailed marble column (shown in Figure 8-1). The tale goes that the Master Carver was afraid of starting work on it without first traveling to Rome to see the original in person. While he was off gallivanting in Italy, his apprentice got both impatient and cocky and carved the pillar himself. When the Master returned, so the story goes, he became so enraged at the perfection of his apprentice’s work that he killed the young man by striking him in the head with a mallet, just as in the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff (see “The Masonic Fraternity: Who Freemasons Are and What They Believe,” earlier in this chapter). A gash on the pillar today is where the Master’s mallet allegedly whacked the column after clobbering his apprentice. Of course, before the late 1700’s, this was called the Prince’s Pillar, and there was no tale of an angry Masonic Master.


Figure 8-1: The dazzlingly intricate Apprentice Pillar in Rosslyn Chapel.

Masonic Knights Templar should know that the chapel contains an inscription that appears in the ritual of their Chivalric degrees: Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas, or “Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.” This quote is from the First Book of Esdras, a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Old Testament, but rejected by Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant biblical scholars as apocryphal.

[Aboaz]

Rosslyn Chapel and the Masons
Templar enthusiasts and Freemasons have long claimed that Rosslyn Chapel, near Edinburgh, Scotland, is chock-full of symbolism for both the Templars and the Freemasons. The writing teams of Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins were among the first authors to publicize and explore the chapel’s potential connections to the Templars, the Freemasons, and a host of other speculative theories. Many more researchers have followed in their footsteps. We talk about Rosslyn Chapel throughout this book but for the sake of this part of the story, you just need to know a little bit about the chapel made world-famous by the end scenes of The Da Vinci Code.

The square and compasses and the Seal of Solomon
The symbol of the square and compasses (shown on the left in the nearby figure) has become synonymous with Freemasonry. They are tools of the building trades, which use them in the everyday application of geometry.


In North America, the letter G commonly appears in the center. Because the earliest stonemasons believed that the secret knowledge of geometry was a gift to them by God, and that God himself was believed to the Grand Architect of the Universe, the G stands for both Godand geometry. Elsewhere in the world, the G rarely appears in the square-and-compasses symbol.

Some scholars have pointed out the similarity of the symbol's basic outline with the Seal of Solomon, or Star of David (shown on the right in the figure). Today, the Seal of Solomon is most commonly associated with the Jewish faith and the flag of the State of Israel. Jewish legends claim that King David had a shield with the symbol that protected him from evil. His son, King Solomon, had the symbol on a signet ring that came from heaven, which he used to perform magic and control demons.

The symbol, made of two triangles, has had many interpretations to Jews, Christians, Muslims, and alchemists. In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown declared the symbol to be a representation of the masculine and the divine feminine, and many believe it represent good and evil, heaven and earth, and other similar yin-yang themes.

Although the symbol of two inverted triangles appears in some Egyptian archeological locations, the actual symbol itself didn't become identified with the Jews or King Solomon until the 1300s in Prague, and didn't become widespread until the 1600s. It actually appeared more commonly in Islamic art during the time of the Crusades.

When, in the 1400s, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent undertook major renovations of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem where Solomon's Temple once stood, he built new city walls and decorated them with the Seal of Solomon as a talisman to protect the city. Because of the Seal of Solomon's connection to the Holy City of Jerusalem and King Solomon, some have claimed that its blatant similarity to the Masonic square and compasses shows a direct progression from the Knights Templar to the Freemasons.

Meanwhile, the square and compasses appear in Christian art and alchemical books all throughout the Middle Ages as symbols of geometry and knowledge, and often are depicted in the hands of God.

The chapel was built in the 1400s by Sir William St. Clair (or Sinclair, depending on the source). The St. Clairs were a noble family descended from Norman knights from France. Historians don’t know when the chapel became associated with either the Templars or Freemasonry, but the connection doesn’t seem to have been discussed prior to the late 1700s, in spite of outlandish claims to the contrary. The chapel was built as a private church for the St. Clair family, and its construction wasn’t started until more than 130 years after the Templars were dissolved. Nevertheless, what makes the chapel unique are the unusual carvings and artwork that are packed into every conceivable crevice.

Masonic carvings?
Among the carvings in Rosslyn Chapel are images supposedly of the Templars. One such carving is said to show the classic image of the Order — two knights on horseback, although it looks to most people more like a mounted knight with a squire, a monk, or perhaps his wife walking behind him.

Another carving is said to depict a Masonic Entered Apprentice prepared as modern initiates are today, with a blindfold (called a hoodwink) and a noose (referred to as a cable tow) around his neck. He appears to be situated between two pillars, perhaps with an open Bible in his hand. Of course, it could also be a figure of a man about to be executed — that’s the funny thing about symbolism. If it is, indeed, a Masonic reference, it should be pointed out that the introduction of the hoodwink and cable tow into Freemasonry’s rituals did not occur until the late 1600s. The chapel was built two centuries before that.

As Robert Cooper has pointed out in his 2006 book The Rosslyn Hoax, the chapel itself was dedicated to St. Matthew. Matthew 15:12-14 may be a clue to the carving’s real origin: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

Freemasonry is loaded with symbolism. Squares, compasses, plumbs, levels, anchors, arks, gavels, trowels, aprons, and a hundred other images play a part in the ritual ceremonies of the Masonic fraternity. In spite of the many claims that Rosslyn is “loaded” with Masonic symbolism, it is not. In fact, it is fair to say that there are no images that are specific to Freemasonry anywhere in the tiny chapel’s thousands of intricate carvings. No matter how many books and experts claim to see Masonic imagery in Rosslyn Chapel, it is wishful thinking.

The Apprentice Pittar
Central to the chapel’s Masonic folklore is the Apprentice Pillar, a magnificently detailed marble column (shown in Figure 8-1). The tale goes that the Master Carver was afraid of starting work on it without first traveling to Rome to see the original in person. While he was off gallivanting in Italy, his apprentice got both impatient and cocky and carved the pillar himself. When the Master returned, so the story goes, he became so enraged at the perfection of his apprentice’s work that he killed the young man by striking him in the head with a mallet, just as in the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff (see “The Masonic Fraternity: Who Freemasons Are and What They Believe,” earlier in this chapter). A gash on the pillar today is where the Master’s mallet allegedly whacked the column after clobbering his apprentice. Of course, before the late 1700’s, this was called the Prince’s Pillar, and there was no tale of an angry Masonic Master.


Figure 8-1: The dazzlingly intricate Apprentice Pillar in Rosslyn Chapel.

Masonic Knights Templar should know that the chapel contains an inscription that appears in the ritual of their Chivalric degrees: Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas, or “Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.” This quote is from the First Book of Esdras, a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Old Testament, but rejected by Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant biblical scholars as apocryphal.

[Aboaz]

Skulls and crossbones!
For a long time, one of the common symbols of the Masonic Templars was a skull and crossbones, which appeared on their aprons worn during ritual ceremonies and meetings (see Figure 8-2). They also appear on gravestones of Masonic Templars throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. The skull and crossbones were associated with the real Knights Templar, and the skull plays a part in the modern Knights Templar Order’s ceremonies.


Figure 8-2: The skull-and-crossbones style Templar apron has been prohibited for use since the 1920s.

You can find the gruesome-looking Templar aprons in antiques stores and on eBay, but they have been officially prohibited for use by the Order since the 1920s, because of the public perception that they were somehow evil. In spite of its more recent connotation as a symbol of malevolence, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the skull and crossbones was a symbol of mortality and was often used to caution the living to prepare for their own end. This is the way it is represented in the Templar ritual today.

Order of DeMolay
Before World War I, the phenomenon of scouting for children took the world by storm. Starting in 1907, the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other similarly styled groups spread across Europe and North America, largely based on the writings of Robert Baden-Powell and his experiences with young men trained as scouts for the British Army in India and North Africa. As scouting grew in popularity, so did other types of youth groups, and it wasn't long before many of the popular fraternal groups started their own.

In 1919, a Freemason named Frank S. Land started a youth group in Kansas City, Missouri, for nine young men. Land was especially concerned for boys who had lost their fathers during World War I. The boys were meeting in the local Masonic hall, and they were intrigued by the Masonic traditions of ritual ceremonies and degrees. Land was also a Knights Templar, and he told the boys the story of the fall of the original Templar Order; their last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay; and his tragic martyrdom (see Chapter 5). Excited by the tale, the boys adopted de Molay as their namesake, and a ritual was designed around his story.

The Order of DeMolay (officially known today as DeMolay International, to reflect its growth beyond the U.S. borders) confers two degrees:
● The Initiatory degree: The Initiatory degree teaches its members seven precepts or cardinal virtues: love of parents, reverence for all things sacred, courtesy, comradeship, fidelity, cleanliness, and patriotism.
● The DeMolay degree: The DeMolay degree portrays the suffering and martyrdom of the Grand Master, stressing his love and loyalty for his brother knights.

Today, there are about 20,000 members of DeMolay, and it's open to young men between the ages of 12 and 21 who, as in Freemasonry, profess a belief in a Supreme Being. It is nondenominational. Many of DeMolay's members go on to become Freemasons, but although the Masonic fraternity supports DeMolay, there is no direct connection between the two organizations.

There is, by the way, no relationship between the Freemasons or the Order of Knights Templar and the Skull and Bones fraternity at Yale University, made famous most recently by the membership of both 2004 presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, other than the use of the same images of mortality. Bonesmen, as the Yale guys are called, are neither Knights Templar nor Freemasons.

The Templars' place within Freemasonry
The Knights Templar Order is part of the York Rite system of additional Masonic degrees, which, in the United States, also include four degrees of the Royal Arch, three of the Cryptic Council, and three Chivalric Orders (the Illustrious Order of the Red Cross, the Order of the Knights of Malta, and the Order of the Knights Templar). Outside of the U.S. there are organizational differences.

Masonic Knights Templar meet in commanderies or preceptories. Their statewide governing bodies are known as Grand Commanderies, and the national organization is called the Grand Encampment (or Grand Priory in Canada).

The Templars are unique in Freemasonry because, unlike most other degrees and appendant bodies, it is one of the few groups that requires a belief in — or at least a willingness to defend — Christianity. The rest of the Masonic fraternity is nondenominational, requiring only a belief in a Supreme Being. In most jurisdictions, men who want to become Knights Templar must also have been through the Royal Arch degrees. Apart from its ritual ceremonies and its drill teams, the Knights Templar is also a philanthropic organization that endows medical-research programs, as well as sponsoring trips to the Holy Land for ministers of all Christian denominations.

Several symbols are identified with the Masonic Knights Templar. The most common is a crown and cross, a cross pattee surrounded by swords, and the motto: In hoc signo vinces, Latin for “In this sign, conquer!”(see Figure 8-3). The motto comes from the story of the Roman Emperor Constantine in A.D. 312, who converted to Christianity after seeing a vision of a chi rho cross in the sun, along with the Latin phrase. Constantine didn’t have a clue what the vision meant, but Jesus appeared to him in a dream and explained that he should use the sign of the cross to conquer his enemies.


Figure 8-3: Typical symbol of the Masonic Knights Templar: the cross pattee, a crown and cross, swords, and the motto In hoc signo vinces (Latin for "In this sign, conquer!")

Earlier in this chapter, we mention the Scottish Rite as being the other branch of appendant bodies in Freemasonry. The Scottish Rite does not confer Templar degrees, per se. However, it does present a series of degrees (the Rose Croix and Knight Kadosh degrees) that are a veiled retelling of the betrayal of knights based in Jerusalem at the hands of a king and an unjust church, and the burning at the stake of their members. That should sound familiar.

The Templar degrees also exist in Freemasonry outside of the United States and Canada, although the York Rite under which they are categorized in North America is different in many countries, and may not exist at all in others. Every country has its own customs. There is no international governing body for Freemasonry in the world. Each country — or in the case of the United States and Canada, each state or province — has its own Grand Lodge, as well as its own governing groups for the appendant bodies.

Nevertheless, one thing all Masonic Knights Templar groups agree upon is that they are definitely not directly descended from the original order of warrior monks. They have based their rules, ceremonies, and governing bodies on the original Templars, but none of them claim to be heirs of the crusading Templar Order.

[Aboaz]

Chapter 9

Modern-Day Templars
In This Chapter
● Tracking the Templars today
● Reviving their chivalric and religious ideals
● Making tenuous Templar connections
● Trading in Templar trademarks

Almost immediately after the excommunication of the Knights Templar, whispers of new organizations began to appear that either claimed a direct descent of the order, or became a haven for the fleeing knights. But as the centuries passed, the Templars occupied a unique place in mythology.
Their popularity was something of an enigma. On the one hand, they were admired for their skill in warfare, their devotion to Christ, their ingenuity in the creation of international banking, and their artistry in building. On the other hand, they had been excommunicated for heresy, distrusted for their secrecy, and damned for their less-than-Christian activities. And — go get a friend, as this will require a another hand — on the third hand, they gradually became the source of endless speculation over their supernatural connection to the occult, the unknown mysteries that they may have discovered within Solomon’s Temple, and no shortage of mind-blowing mystical manifestations heaped on them ever since.

The result over the centuries has been a gaggle of groups, from pseudomilitary orders at one end, to secret societies on the other, all claiming some kind of kinship with the Templars of old. And because of the wide range of activities and myths attributed to the Templars, that kinship can cover a lot of unusual ground.

During the 1800s in particular, the Templars became the subject of an incredibly far-flung romance with the chivalric qualities of protection, honor, faith, and decency. In addition, the 1800s was a period of widespread fascination with legends connected with the Templars — Solomon’s Temple, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Holy Grail.
In Chapter 8, we discuss the principal group most often identified with the Knights Templar — the Freemasons. In this chapter, we cover the less famous groups around the world that claim to be descended or derived from, inspired or spawned by, or otherwise related to the Templars, as well as a few that sound similar but aren’t. We also look at some of the ways that advertisers cashed in on Templar mania. And we finish up with a look at the huge popularity of the Templars in the 21st century and their appearance in games, books, comics, and movies.

Modern Templar Orders
During the 1800s, Freemasonry was just one of the literally hundreds of fraternal organizations that sprung up across the United States and around the world. Most of the “secret societies” that followed its success patterned themselves after Masonic lodges and ceremonies. They initiated candidates using solemn ceremonies that conferred different grades or degrees, and required their members to take oaths promising never to divulge their secrets. It wasn’t just eating-and-drinking clubs that were doing this stuff. Benevolent assistance groups that mostly existed to provide cheap insurance policies for their members, and even labor unions soon began dressing up their officers in fancy costumes, creating lavish and ever more convoluted rituals, and bestowing bilious and bloated titles of rank and honor upon each other.

The most common thread that ran though these groups was the title of knight. Chivalry was something that a railroad worker, coal miner, or plumber was unlikely to encounter in his daily life, and knights only existed in storybooks. But in their lodges, knighthood flourished. Swords tapped them on the shoulders and titles of rank and honor were bestowed left and right. And there were literally dozens of these groups, from the Knights of the Mystic Circle, the Knights of Pythias, and the Knights of Columbus, to the Knights of the Golden Circle and even the Knights of the Invisible Colored Kingdom.
Apart from the Masonic Knights Templar (see Chapter 8), several fraternal and esoteric groups aligned themselves with the Knights Templar, many of which survive today. They run the gamut from serious religious or chivalric organizations to temperance leagues and even doomsday cults. It is a testament to the power of the Templar mystique that so many groups have sought to identify in one way or another with them. More astonishing is why many religious, and especially Catholic, groups would align themselves with the memory of an order that was excommunicated for heresy.

Order Militia Crucifera Evangelica
Claiming origin in 1586 in Germany, the modern international organization known as the Order Militia Curcifera Evangelica (OMCE) was started in 1990, and has a strong esoteric element to its mission. It’s a nondenominational order and has strong ties to Rosicrucianism (see the nearby sidebar). This should be no surprise — it was founded by Gary L. Spenser, who was at one time the Grand Imperator of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, one of the largest Rosicrucian orders in the world. Open to both men and women, the OMCE has priories in the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Greece, and Singapore. (Go to www.omcesite.org for more information.)

Rosicrucians
Any time you stick your toe in the water of fraternal and esoteric groups, the two that appear over and over again are the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. We discuss the Freemasons in Chapter 8, but it's worth knowing about the Rosicrucians as well.
Esoteric comes from the Greek word esoterikos, meaning "inner," and Rosicrucianism is a legendary order dedicated to the study of the esoteric, or inner knowledge. The term itself comes from the symbol of a rose and cross, a longtime symbol of Christ.

The legend of the first Rosicrucians first appeared in three books published in the early 1600s in Germany: Fama_Fraternitatis (1614), Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), and Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (1616). Without trying to get an argument started among true believers, we can tell you that the probable author of at least the last work — and probably all of them — was a German theologian named Johann Valentin Andreae. In it, the story of the order's mythical founder, Christian Rosenkreutz, is recounted. According to the legend, Rosenkreutz traveled the Middle East during the 1400s and studied esoteric knowledge under the tutelage of the greatest sages and mystics. He returned to Europe and founded the Rosicrucian Order to bring about the reformation of the world. The order was supposed to be limited to just eight members, who traveled the globe in search of knowledge and were supposed to return every year to share what they had found. According to the legend, the order disappeared, but it was reborn in the 1600s, not coincidentally with the publication of the three important books about them.

Rosicrucianism in its various incarnations incorporates alchemy, hermeticism, astrology, and spiritual healing, with a special fondness for ancient Egyptian teachings. The modern Rosicrucians use alchemy as a symbolic lesson for taking the baser aspects of man and, through spiritual alchemy, perfecting the soul, just as the ancient alchemists labored to turn base metals into gold.

It's a strange thing about esoteric societies: The vast majority of them have been riddled with breaks, schisms, lawsuits among the leaders, fights among the faithful, and a general clash of largish egos. The story of the Rosicrucians since about 1700 has been no exception. Over the years, there have been a wide variety of Rosicrucian groups, but the largest and best known is the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), founded in 1915 by Harvey Spencer Lewis. Its headquarters today are in Rosicrucian Park in San Jose, California, which is noted for its Egyptian Museum and planetarium.

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Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani
This order’s name is taken from the Latin, and it means “Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem.” The particular group was founded in 1804 in Paris, and today is a nondenominational, Christian chivalric organization.

Ordo Supremus Militaris Templi Hierosolymitani (OSMTH) is one of the few modern Templar groups that, at least until recently, claimed a direct descent from the medieval knights, by way of the Larmenius Charter (see Chapter 7).

OSMTH long alleged that a continuous line of Grand Masters continued to meet in secret for four centuries. In 1705, in France, a group of noblemen elected Phillip duc d’Orleans as the new Grand Master of the order; he revived it publicly as a “secular order of chivalry.” Having Phillip as the head of the order lent it great prestige; he became the Regent of France and held this position until his death in 1723. During the French Revolution, the order’s then Grand Master, the Duke de Cosse Brissac, was executed, but the group reemerged in the 1800s and expanded between 1818 and 1841across France and into Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Brazil, India, and the United States.

In 1940, during World War II (WWII), the control of the order was centered in Belgium. When the Nazis occupied the country, the order’s records were secretly sent to politically neutral Portugal. They were placed in the care of a Portuguese nobleman, Count Antonio Campello Pinto de Sousa Fontes. You can’t have a secret society very long before egos, schisms, and lawsuits get in the way, and this order is no exception. After the war, Fontes believed that the position of Grand Master had been transferred to him, but the surviving Belgian group disagreed. It wasn’t long before suits and countersuits started flying, especially when Fontes died. Normal protocol would have demanded an election of a new Grand Master, but Fontes simply willed the position to his son. That seems to have been the final straw for the various pre-WWII priories around the world.

The result has been a half-century of arguments and court decisions. In the United States, a flurry of incorporating and trademarking ensued, and the order is known as the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, Inc. (You can find out more about the order at http://us.osmth.org.)

A competing, pro-Fontes organization in the United States is the Ordo Pauperum Commilitum Christi et Templi Solomonis, Equis Templi (www.knighttemplar.org).

The problem is in the rest of the world, where the groups each call themselves the exact same name. The pro-Fontes group — known informally as the Loyalists or OSMTH-Regency — is on one side. On the other side is a larger group that officially reformed in 1995; the new OSMTH (www.osmth.org) is actually an umbrella organization of approximately 5,000 members, with associations located in Austria, Canada, England and Wales, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Scotland, Serbia, and the United States.

Ordo Novi Templi
In the years leading up to World War I (WWI), there was a fascination in Germany and Austria with Viking paganism, as anyone who has sat through all 16 hours of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen four-part opera trilogy can attest. Heroic tales of Germanic gods, dwarves, mythical creatures, cryptic runes (symbols), and magic rings didn’t start with Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings (or with J. R. R. Tolkien, for that matter) — Wagner is where Tolkien got the idea in the first place. And in turn, Wagner got it from the writings of Guido von List.

Between about 1890 and 1935, two Austrians garnered a huge interest in these Nordic legends with their writings: Guido von List and Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. List himself was a follower of a Russian-born mystic, magician, and esoteric author, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and her theories of theosophy, which blended a whole raft of Eastern philosophy, Hinduism, Buddhism, spiritualism, and mystical parlor tricks together with her own arrogant ideas about racial superiority.

List salted in his own mix of worship of the old Norse god Wotan, along with tales of the magical effects of 1st-century German and Scandinavian inscriptions called runes (the swastika and the dual lightning-bolt symbol adopted by the Nazi SS are both examples of runes). List believed that a secret ancient Aryan priesthood had developed this esoteric knowledge.

He eventually amassed a large following of fans, and a Guido von List Society actually formed before WWI, with a fairly impressive membership list of prestigious and famous people. One of those fans was Adolf Josef Lanz, another Vienna student of the occult. Like List, Lanz had been born a Catholic, and he had even become a Cistercian monk for a while as a young man. In truth, Lanz remained captivated by the ritual and history of the Catholic Church, especially in its medieval days.

Lanz didn’t have much use for List’s Wotan worship and his fanciful mythology of Germany’s glorious past, but he was very interested in List’s theories about ancient, secret knowledge of runes, magic, racial purity, and esotericism. The difference was, Lanz didn’t need some silly nonsense about Viking gods. He knew exactly who those secret Aryan priests were: They were Knights Templar.

In 1907, Lanz founded the Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Temple), in the Castle Werfenstein, overlooking the Danube, flying a flag that included both the fleur-de-lis and the swastika, a rune symbolic of power, many years before it was adopted as the symbol of the Nazi Party. Lanz tinkered with List’s ideas and developed what he termed Ariosophy, which he applied to his new form of chivalric knighthood. This Aryan philosophy was a variation on Darwin’s survival of the fittest, applied to human beings; Lanz was especially contemptuous of Christian compassion for what he termed the “weak and inferior.” Lanz believed that a race could only wind up at the top of the heap of civilization if it dispensed with its underprivileged citizens and unsatisfactory racial types through arrest, abortion, sterilization, or starvation, while encouraging the breeding of an ever-improving “master race.” He promoted his theory in a magazine called Ostara, and it became popular throughout Germany and Austria.

The Ordo Novi Templi seemed to be more overtly directed to political ambitions than engaging in racial purity experiments. It supported the Serbian secret society, the Black Hand, a group made up of military officers who assassinated, among others, Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, the action that set off WWI. And it was a key supporter of the Austrian National Socialist Party in the 1930s. Curiously, when Adolph Hitler came to power, the Ordo Novi Templi was one of the first groups to be outlawed by the Nazis, in spite of its founder’s clearly like-minded theories and the order’s support of fascism. Even so, the Nazi Party didn’t mind heroic depictions of Hitler himself as a heroic crusading knight (see Figure 9-1). And Hitler’s head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, had visions of the SS as an elite knightly order, like the Templars and the Teutonic Knights (see Chapter 15).


Figure 9-1: Hitler as a crusading knight. The Standard Bearer (Der Bannertrager), 1938, by Hubert Lanzinger.

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Ordo Militia Templi
Formed in 1979, this order is headquartered in Siena, Italy, in a small complex of 12th-century Templar buildings collectively known as the Castle of the Magione. Originally, it was started as a program for Catholic Scouts, but it has developed into an adult organization, made up of several hundred members around the world. Ordo Militia Templi is a Roman Catholic lay order, whose purpose is to promote the Catholic faith by taking strict vows and following the spirit of Templar monastic knighthood.

They appear to be part of a “traditionalist” movement within the Catholic Church, and they celebrate the mass using the pre-Vatican II Latin liturgy. This order is open to both men and women, but be aware that their regimen is very demanding — in 2005, there were just four members in the United States. (The U.S. Web site of Ordo Militia Templi is at www.militiatempli.org.)

Chivalric Martinist Order
The Chivalric Martinist Order (http://interfaithinstitute.cqhost.ne...nistOrder.html) is a relatively new order, but its origins touch on a group of Gnostic (see Chapter 5) and esoteric studies collectively known as Martinism (see the “Martinism” sidebar in this chapter). This order initiates its candidates into a Christian knighthood whose philosophy comprises Christian, Gnostic, hermetic, and Rosicrucian beliefs. It is open to both men and women.

Order of the Solar Temple
The name of this group may ring a bell with you, and not a pleasant one. The modern group seems to have come from a 1984 schism (there’s that word again) from an earlier order formed in 1952 in France. Its principal founders were a jeweler and clockmaker named Joseph Di Mambro, and a homeopathic doctor named Luc Jouret.

Di Mambro and Jouret were living in Geneva, Switzerland, and both were students of esotericism. They convinced the members of the new order of the Solar Temple that they were both reincarnations of 14th-century Knights Templar. (Why does everyone who claims to be reincarnated say they’re former nobility? Don’t fifth-century shoe cobblers or 19th-century chimney sweeps ever get reincarnated?) Even better, they claimed that Di Mambro’s daughter Emmanuelle was the product of a virgin birth.

Martinism
Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin was an 18th-century French mystic. Though in the United States his influences are largely unknown to anyone but the most dedicated student of obscure knowledge, Martinism pervades many esoteric societies across Europe, and is beginning to make inroads in the United States. It's important to our discussion here because several organizations claim both Templar and Martinist influences.

Born in 1743, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin was a French nobleman. He was briefly imprisoned during the French Revolution but was released because local authorities wanted him to become a schoolteacher. This was during the period of the Age of Enlightenment, when the application of the scientific method was applied to virtually everything in the world, including religion. The Enlightenment philosophers turned away from the superstitions of the past, along with notions of astrology, alchemy, and mysticism. Saint-Martin disagreed with this approach, as most of his contemporary students of esotericism did. In many ways, the wave of interest in spiritualism, magic, and similar "mystic arts" that swept across the Western world in the 1800s and early 1900s was a reaction against the Enlightenment, with the implied message that not everything in the world could be explained scientifically.

Louis-Claude became a student of an 18th-century kabbalist named Joachim Martinez Pasquales, and later translated several obscure 17th-century works by a German mystic, Jacob BOhme, into French. Using them as inspiration, Saint-Martin developed his own philosophy about Life, the Universe, and Everything, called the Way of the Heart. Essentially, Bohme had theorized that in order to achieve a state of grace, man had to fall away from God and do battle with the demons and evil angels who caused the sins of the world. Only after spiritual victory over these evils could man again return to God's good graces. There is nothing new under the sun — the Gnostics and the Cathars got slaughtered by the Inquisition for these kinds of "heresies." The only difference was that the Protestant Reformation of the ensuing years had blunted the Catholic Church's monopoly on judging who was a heretic and who wasn't.

Saint-Martin's discussion circles became popular, and eventually more formalized as an organization called the Society of Friends. His writings were signed by the enigmatic name of the Unknown Philosopher. Saint-Martin objected to the prevailing custom of most esoteric societies of the period that prohibited women from joining, and he allowed female members to have equal membership status. After his death in 1803, similar societies began to spread, largely through the efforts of an enthusiastic supporter named Gerard Encausse (who went by the name of Papus), and there was much crossover between the usual suspects of esotericism: Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Gnostics, and these new Martinists. In 1888, Encausse formed a mystery school called the Ordere Martinist, and by 1900, there were chapters in a dozen countries, with hundreds of members.

WWI killed off the principal leaders of the order, and its central organization dissolved. Several splinter groups supported an attempt to restore the kings of France. Others became enamored with a strange movement called Synarchy, an attempt to rule European countries by means of secret societies. Sounding a lot like the modern kooky conspiracy theories of Lyndon LaRouche, Synarchie was promoted by an occult mystic named Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who claimed to get telepathic messages from Shangri-La, directing his actions for world takeover. A small clot of enthusiastic Martinists got excited at the prospects of taking over the governments of Europe, and formed the Ordre Martiniste Synarchie. Obviously, it didn't work, and Saint-Martin himself would have been somewhat appalled. In response, three of the surviving old guard from the late 1800s got together and formed the Ordre Martiniste Traditionale (Traditional Martinist Order), in an effort to restore the group to Saint-Martin's "Way of the Heart."

WWII all but destroyed Martinist societies in Europe, as the Nazis imprisoned or executed most members of so-called "secret societies" that they hadn't created themselves. The Traditional Martinist Order had made its way to the United States through Rosicrucian groups in the 1930s, and it survives today. The Internet has done much to spread Saint-Martin's philosophies, and new groups have appeared recently along with the traditional ones. They cover a broad range of philosophies and disciplines, with some incorporating Rosicrucian influences, some borrowing from the largely Memphis-Mizraim branch of Freemasonry that has been deemed irregular by the majority of the mainstream Masonic world, and some simply adhering strictly to Saint-Martin's philosophies.

The story was that Emmanuelle was, in fact, a “cosmic child,” who would lead the members of the Solar Temple to a secret planet in orbit around the star Sirius (better known as the “Dog Star”). But in order to get there, there was one small step that Solar Temple members would have to undergo: a cataclysmic death by fire at the end of the world.

The Solar Temple was a strange melange of Protestantism, Rosicrucianism, plagiarized Masonic rituals, UFO-ology, New Age silliness, and even a little homeopathic medicine tossed in for good measure. They ultimately aimed a little high for their goals — the ultimate reunification of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to prepare for the second coming of Christ.

Unfortunately, the real goal seemed to be to lavishly line the pockets of Di Mambro and Jouret, who charged gobs of cash for initiation fees, regalia, robes, swords, medals, and of course, advancement to the higher levels of secret knowledge. The group moved to Quebec, Canada, and Di Mambro started investing in real estate around the world, amassing new “temples” to conduct services in luxurious vacation hotspots. Meanwhile back in Quebec, construction began on a massive, concrete-lined bunker to prepare for the coming End of the World festivities. Jouret began amassing a stockpile of weapons, just in case, insisting that, in The End, only Quebec would be saved from total destruction.

The trouble with doomsday cults is that, sooner or later, you have to put up or shut up. Humans are, by nature, impatient. And if you don’t produce an apocalyptic cataclysm that consumes the Earth’s vast majority of sinners and saves the small clot of the faithful in a timely manner, your members quickly get restless. Likewise, Solar Temple members began to walk away when the global ball of fire and the plans for their trip to Sirius both failed to materialize. The founders had to do something. And they did.

In October of 1994, Di Mambro announced that an infant born in the group’s Quebec compound was, in fact, the antichrist, and ordered it killed. The baby was stabbed repeatedly with a wooden stake. A few days later, Di Mambro and 12 followers reenacted the Last Supper, and what followed made headlines around the world. Solar Temple followers in Switzerland and Canada were found dead, victims of ritualistic mass murder-suicides. Fifteen inner-circle members (referred to as the “Awakened”) committed suicide with poison, 30 (the “Immortals”) were shot in the head or smothered, and another 8 (the “Traitors”) died in other various ways. Electronic timing devices set fire to the temple, so the members would undergo the much-promised cataclysmic death by fire. Shortly afterward, another 48 members were discovered in an underground Swiss Solar Temple and a French mountain chalet, dressed in ceremonial robes, and drugged or shot. Many had placed plastic garbage bags over their heads as a symbol of the ecological disaster that the Earth would find itself in once the virtuous Solar Temple members had departed for Sirius. In the coming years, several similar murder/suicide attempts by Solar Temple members were thwarted, all around the solar solstices and equinoxes. In all, 78 deaths were attributed to the cult between 1994 and 1997.