Rycerze Świątyni.doc

by Tracy R. Twyman

October 18, 2004

from DragonKeyPress Website

recovered through WayBackMachine Website

According to chroniclers of their early years, the Knights Templar were founded in 1188 by Hughes de Payen, a vassal of the Count of Champagne. This occurred after they had presented themselves to Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, whose older brother, Godfroi de Bouillon had led the crusaders to victory in the Holy Land almost twenty years previous.

They proposed themselves as a order of fighting monks, who would protect the roadways for pious pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem. They were immediately given an entire wing of the royal palace as their headquarters - a wing that had been built upon the foundations of the Temple of Solomon. Thus they received their name: "the Knights of the Temple."

For the next nine years they admitted no new members to their order - strange since the nine founding members hardly seem like they would have provided an adequate number of staff to protect all of the roads to the Holy Land. Furthermore, there is no evidence from contemporary chroniclers indicating that they even engaged in such activities.

Guillame de Tyre, the chief chronicler of the age and an intimate associate of King Baldwin, doesn't even mention them, causing the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail to suspect that he had been silenced by the royal muzzle to cover up for the Templars' actual activities - excavating the Temple Mount. The authors speculate that when the Roman legions sacked the Temple in 70 A.D., they took only the most obvious loot, unwittingly leaving behind the most valuable treasure, chief among which would have been the Ark of the Covenant, and perhaps, the artifact which came to be known as the Holy Grail.

This could have been secreted away by the Temple priests in any of the numerous tunnels known to exist beneath Solomon's Stables on the Temple Mount - stables which the Templars made use of during their nine-year stay. This could have, in fact, been the purpose behind the foundation of their order - a mission based upon knowledge that had been passed down from Christ's descendants to the Merovingians, and then on to the Templars' founders.

The main figures involved in the Templar's foundation - King Baldwin, the Count of Champagne, Andre de Montbard, Hughes de Payen, Bertrand de Blanchefort and Godfroi de Bouillon were all descendants of Merovingian blood, and if they had been in on the family secrets, that would explain why they willingly pledged themselves, their money, and in the king's case, the royal quarters, to the cause. If they had been successful in their mission, it could explain how they acquired the capital with which they eventually created a vast empire.

During their first nine years they became famous throughout Europe as the selfless "Militia of Christ."

By 1127, most of the knights had returned to Europe, and in the following year, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, Andre de Montbard's uncle, published a pro-Templar tract entitled In Praise of the New Knighthood. At the Saint Bernard-inspired Council of Troyes, the Church officially recognized the Templars as a religious and military order dedicated to the defense of Christendom.

Saint Bernard then assisted in drawing up their rules of conduct, based upon those of the Cistercian order of monks, another group upon whom Bernard had much influence. Templars were sworn to poverty and celibacy. They wore white mantels to symbolize their purity, emblazoned with the red cross patee. And just as the Merovingians were forbidden to cut their hair, the Templars were likewiseforbidden to cut their beards. The Templars' reputation for bravery was well-earned.

They were not allowed to retreat from battle unless the odds outweighed them three to one, and when they were captured they were obliged to fight to the death rather than beg for mercy or ransom. They were also pledged to secrecy about the orders workings, and were inducted with a strange initiation ceremony about which there were many rumors. A few years later, there was another interesting development in their rule.

In 1139, a former student of Saint Bernard's, Pope Innocent II, issued a papal bull stating that the Knights Templar would owe allegiance to none except the Pope himself, making them immune to the political whims of all authorities, both religious and secular.

As their fame grew, so did their ranks, and thus, their property holdings. The sons of European nobility swelled their membership, and the vast amounts of money and property donated by the new recruits swelled their territory and their coffers, for new recruits, as per their vow of poverty, were required to relinquish all property upon admittance to the order.

Soon they stood at the helm of a huge, international empire over which they held complete independent sovereignty. During Christendom's Second Crusade, the Templars accompanied France's King Louis II into battle, and played a decisive role in preventing the war from becoming a total disaster. Over the next century, they secured their important role in international politics by utilizing their influence upon a number of kings, nobles, and ecclesiastic authorities. Many of these kings were financially indebted to the Templars, and some actually resided with them.

The Grand Master of the Temple even stood by England's King John as he signed the Magna Carta. At times, it appeared that the Templars possessed the power to make or break a monarch's career according to their desire.

Their political influence spread in direct proportion to their huge banking operation. In fact, the modern institution of banking, in which money can be deposited in one location and withdrawn in another, is a Templar invention, along with the "cheque", likely named after the "chequerboard" pattern that was one of the Templars' most well-recognized motifs.

This made it possible for pilgrims and travelers to journey safely without fear of roadside robbers, and the cheques were unforgable, as they were written in sophisticated secret codes for which the Templars became known. Almost every king or queen in Europe banked with them, as well as a number of Muslim leaders whom they dealt with on a regular basis.

As Holy Blood, Holy Grail puts it,

"The Templars thus became the primary money changers of the age, and the Paris preceptory became the center of European finance."

The Templars' enterprises made them the conduits of new forms of art, science, and craft, new forms of thought and belief. They had access to new advances in agriculture, armaments, surveying, mapmaking, and navigation, and they were one of the first groups of people to employ the magnetic compass in their seafaring.

They ran their own hospitals to treat wounded soldiers, and were at the forefront of modern medicine, bringing to the field a scientific point of view unusual among their contemporaries, including an unprecedented understanding of the principals of hygiene. They even made medical use of mold extracts, similar to the widespread use of penicillin as an antibiotic today.

Their mastery of architectural principles, both ancient and modern, including the understanding of advanced mathematics, such as was used in the building of the Giza pyramid, for example, along with their patronage of the stonemasons' guilds, led to the development of Gothic architecture. 

They were equally influential in bringing new religious and philosophical ideas into vogue throughout Europe, including blends of Islamic, Judaic, and, for lack of a better term, "Gnostic" threads of thought, setting the stage for Europe's cultural Renaissance, which followed the medieval era and incorporated these same themes.

Their ambiguous relationship with the Saracen enemy in the Holy Land, with whom they maintained a respectful peace whenever possible, led to the incorporation of a number of these new thought systems and scientific techniques, for Arab culture was still, at that time, a high civilization. There were even rumors of a close relationship with the Order of the Assassins, called by some authorities the Islamic equivalent to the Knights Templar.

Like the Templars, they took oaths of secrecy, conducted strange ceremonies, and were obliged to fight with the same fanatical bravery.

But when their relationship with the Muslims began to deteriorate, the Templars' foothold in Jerusalem began to slip. King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem died in 1185. In the battle over the succession that resulted, the current Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Gerard de Ridefort, was said to have betrayed some oath made to the deceased king, initiating a near-civil war amongst the Europeans living in the Holy Land.

He also managed to destroy the long-established truce between the Christians and the Saracens, and led the Christians into a battle at Hattin in 1187 that resulted in the end of their 100-year-long reign in Jerusalem. By 1291, almost the entire Holy Land was under Saracen control. The last Christian fortress, Acre, fell dramatically in May of that year.

The Templars set up new headquarters in Cyprus, but without the Holy Land to protect, or new territory to capture on behalf of Christendom, they lacked any clear-cut goals. The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail suggest that at this point, the Knights Templar turned their attention towards a new ambition: creating their own independent European state.

Other authors, such as Alan Butler and Stephen Dafoe, have suggested that Switzerland is a likely candidate for the planned Templar state, and even suggest that the Swiss nation is a direct result of this. Evidence they give includes the extensive Templar holdings that existed there, the Templar-style equilateral cross on their national flag, and the well-established role that Switzerland plays as the center of European finance.

But the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail believe that the land which the Templars had picked to be the "New Jerusalem" was, in fact, the Languedoc region of Southern France - land of the Merovingian kings, whose descendants included the Templars' founders.

It was also the realm of the Cathar heretics, who, as it turned out, were closely associated with the Knights Templar as well.

It has been written that one of the Templars' founders was a Cathar, and that their fourth Grand Master, Bertrand de Blanchefort, was from a "Cathar family." So too were many of the order's dignitaries.

And although the Templars were officially neutral in regards to the Albigensian crusade, they did accept a number of Cathars into their ranks at that time, providing them with immunity from prosecution. They even allowed Cathar refugees to take shelter in their preceptories, and on some occasions did defend them militarily.

According to Holy Blood, Holy Grail,

"In the Languedoc, Temple officials were more frequently Cathar than Catholic", and, "The Grand Master at the time... declared there was in fact only one true crusade - the crusade against the Saracens."

But the Catholic crusade against heresy would soon be turned against the Templars themselves, and the Holy Inquisition, which had been formed to deal with the Cathar problem, would soon be torturing their knights. For by 1306, the Templars had made a most powerful enemy: King Philippe IV of France. He did not merely resent them because they owed no allegiance to him, being obliged solely to the Holy See, and constituted a military threat greater than his own armed forces.

He also owed them a lot of money, which he could not afford to repay, but which he knew they held in great abundance. Furthermore, they had insulted him in the past by refusing him admittance to their ranks. Perhaps he had even heard about the treasure from Jerusalem that they supposedly possessed. Whichever the case, he had decided that he would do away with the Templars, not only in his own domains, but everywhere altogether.

And the only other power he knew of that held the amount of international clout needed to execute the plan was the only power that held command over the Templars: the Papacy. But manipulating the Papacy was nothing new to King Philippe the Fair. He had already, as most historians will attest, played a guiding role in the kidnapping of Pope Boniface VIII and the poisoning of Pope Benedict XI.

The current pope, Clement V, owed his very throne to Philippe, who had been responsible for his election. Even as the son of Ida de Blanchefort, from the same family as the Templars' fourth Grand Master, Clement V still could not resist pressure from Philippe the Fair. Philippe wanted to persecute the Templars for heresy.

The drama which unfolded thereafter gave rise to numerous legends, including the superstition surrounding "Friday the 13th."

Philippe had drafted a list of charges, largely based on evidence gleaned from spies, and from a defected Templar who agreed to be a witness. He then issued secret orders to his seneschals throughout France, sealed, with instructions that they were to be opened at dawn on Friday, October 13, 1307, and implemented immediately. All Templars were to be arrested at once, and all of the order's property seized.

Despite the trouble the king went through to keep the plan secret, the Templars still seemed to have received some sort of warning, for the vast majority of their wealth, along with whatever holy relics they presumably possessed, had already been spirited away into trusted hands far from the king's reach. (Most of this could be achieved through their highly sophisticated network of banks.)

The order's current Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, had just had all of the order's books burnt for no apparent reason. And one Templar who left the order had been told by the treasurer that this was a "wise" move, as danger for the order lurked around the corner. Also, a memo had been given to all of the Templar preceptories in France warning their members not to divulge any information to anyone about the order's customs and rituals. The Templars who were arrested went without struggle, as if they had been instructed to submit.

However, not all Templars were arrested. It is known that a group of them, all closely associated with the treasurer, escaped, taking with them, presumably, all the wealth and treasure they could carry. According to the legends, the Templars loaded the loot onto wagons, which they then transported to the coast, where eighteen ships awaited them at the Templar naval base at La Rochelle.

These ships vanished without a trace shortly before the arrests. 

The fate of the arrested knights varied. All were interrogated, and many were tortured into confessing. The confessions, as well as the accusations, all revolved around similar themes.

A list of charges drawn up by the Inquisition on August 12th, 1308 reads:

·   Item, that in each province they had idols, namely heads.

·   Item, that they adored these idols.

·   Item, that they said that the head could save them.

·   Item, that it could make riches.

·   Item, that it could make the trees flower.

·   Item, that it made the land germinate.

·   Item, that they surrounded or touched each head of the aforesaid idol with small cords, which they wore around themselves next to the shirt or the flesh.

They were also accused, among other things, of homosexual rites, of baby sacrifice, of committing abortions, and of ritually trampling upon the Christian cross during their initiation ceremony.

A widespread interpretation of this ritual, repeated often throughout the confessions, is that they were expressing their denial of the crucifixion, presumably because they had come across evidence thatChrist (Jesus) did not die on the cross. This ritual could also have served as an introduction to a spiritual discipline that was older than Christianity. One aspirant, during the initiation ceremony, was supposedly told that he should not believe in Christ, but in a "higher God."

A crucifix was then displayed, and he was told,

"Set not much faith in this, for it is far too young."

The accusations regarding this ritual, however, had been floating around the rumor mill since at least 1249.

The most widespread and consistent aspect of the confessions, however, involved the worship of a head, specifically an idol named "Baphomet." Some said it was a man's head, some a woman's head, some said that it was bearded, some that it was made of glass or crystal, and some said that it had two faces. A popular tale held that it was the head of the Templar's first Grand Master, Hughes de Payens, or that of John the Baptist.

The latter seems a likely rumor to have been circulating amongst the Templars, for one of the theories surrounding the order is that they ascribed to the Johannite belief that John the Baptist was the true messiah, and Christ a false prophet. Some even said that Baphomet was not a mere head, but a demon, perhaps the Devil himself - half-male, half-female, half-human, and half-beast.

This was the source for the 19th century occultist Eliphas Levi's well-known depiction of Baphomet, now incorporated into the Waite tarot deck as "the Devil." This popular image, sometimes referred to as "the Sabbatic Goat", was made to embody symbols of conflicting dualities. Thus the beast bears the breasts of a woman and the sex organs of a man.

He is shown poised between the waxing and waning moon symbols with his right and left hands pointing up and down, respectively. Levi designed a sigil depicting an inverted pentagram with Baphomet's goat face super-imposed onto it, and called it the "Goat of Mendes."

This symbol was later used by Anton LaVey's Church of Satan.

Yet there was another idolatrous head found during the raid on the Templar's Paris preceptory which presents an intriguing possibility about Baphomet. According to the written account, it was, "a great head of gilded silver, most beautiful, and consisting of the image of a woman. Inside were two head-bones wrapped in a cloth of white linen, with another red cloth around it. A label was attached, on which was written the legend 'Caput 58 M.'"

Given the evidence that the Templars knew of and believed in the Grail family, descendants of Christ, and Mary Magdalen, it is theorized that this idol contains the relics of Magdalen herself. After all, asBoyd Rice has suggested, 5 + 8 = 13, and M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, so "58 M" could be a code signifying the name "Mary Magdalen."

However, there is another important detail to consider as well. The "M" was actually written as the astrological sign for "Virgo." There is, as discussed in the articles The Cutting of the Orm and Le Serpent Rouge Decoded, a connection between the figure of Mary Magdalen and the figure of Virgo. There is also a connection between Mary Magdalen and the goddess Venus, or Isis. 

As it turns out, Isis figures in to a popular legend regarding the origin of Baphomet. According to the tale, a Templar called "the Lord of Sidon" was in love with a young woman named Yse (possibly derived from "Isis"), who died suddenly. On the night of her burial, he dug up her body and copulated with it. Nine months later a voice "from the Void" told him to go back to the grave, where he would find his son.

There he discovered a head resting on a pair of legbones (perhaps the origin of the Templar's famous skull and crossbones symbol.)

The voice told him that if he was careful to guard the head, it would be "the giver of all things." He took it with him and for the rest of his days it protected him...