The Templar Orders In Freemasonry.pdf

THE TEMPLAR ORDERS IN FREEMASONRY

An Historical Consideration of their Origin and Development

By ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE

HAVING regard to the fact that Emblematic Freemasonry, as it is

known and practised at this day, arose from an Operative Guild and

within the bosom of a development from certain London Lodges which

prior to the year 1717 had their titles in the past of the Guild

and recognised its Old Charges, it would seem outside the

reasonable likelihood of things that less than forty years after

the foundation of Grand Lodge Knightly Orders should begin to be

heard of developing under the aegis of the Craft, their titles in

some cases being borrowed from the old institutions of Christian

Chivalry. It is this, however, which occurred, and the inventions

were so successful that they multiplied on every side, from 1754

to the threshold of the French Revolution, new denominations being

devised when the old titles were exhausted. There arose in this

manner a great tree of Ritual, and it happens, moreover, that we

are in a position to affirm the kind of root from which it sprang.

Twenty years after the date of the London Grand Lodge, and when

that of Scotland may not have been twelve months old, the

memorable Scottish Freemason, Andrew Michael Ramsay, delivered an

historical address in a French Lodge, in the course of which he

explained that the Masonic Brotherhood arose in Palestine during

the period of the Crusades, under the protection of Christian

Knights, with the object of restoring Christian Churches which had

been destroyed by Saracens in the Holy Land. For some reason which

does not emerge, the foster-mother of Masonry, according to the

mind of the hypothesis, was the Chivalry of St. John. Ramsay

appears to have left the Masonic arena, and he died in the early

part of 1743, but his discourse produced a profound impression on

French Freemasonry. He offered no evidence, but France undertook

to produce it after its own manner and conformably to the spirit

of the time by the creation of Rites and Degrees of Masonic

Knighthood, no trace of which is to be found prior of Ramsay.

Their prototypes of course were extant, the Knights of Malta,

Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, Knights of St. Lazarus, in the gift

of the Papal See, and the Order of Christ in Portugal, in the gift

of the Portuguese Crown. There is no need to say that these

Religious and Military Orders have nothing in common with the

Operative Masonry of the past, and when their titles were borrowed

for the institution of Masonic Chivalries, it is curious how

little the latter owed to the ceremonial of their precursors, in

their manners of making and installing Knights, except in so far

as the general prototype of all is found in the Roman Pontifical.

There are, of course, reflections and analogies: (I) in the old

knightly corporations the candidate was required to produce proofs

of noble birth, and the Strict Observance demanded these at the

beginning, but owing to obvious difficulties is said to have ended

by furnishing patents at need; (2) in the Military Order of

Hospitallers of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalern, he undertook, as

in others, to protect the Church of God, with which may be

compared modern Masonic injunctions in the Temple and Holy

Sepulchre to maintain and defend the Holy Christian Faith; (3)

again at his Knighting he was "made, created and constituted now

and for ever," which is identical, word for word, with the formula

of another Masonic Chivalry, and will not be unknown to many.

But the appeal of the new foundations was set in an6ther

direction, and was either to show that they derived from Masonry

or were Masonry itself at the highest, in the proper understanding

thereof. When the story of a secret perpetuation of the old

Knights Templar- outside the Order of Christ- arose in France or

Germany, but as I tend to conclude in France, it was and remains

the most notable case in point of this appeal and claim. It rose

up within Masonry, and it came about that the Templar element

overshadowed the dreams and pretensions of other Masonic

Chivalries, or, more correctly, outshone them all. I am dealing

here with matters of fact and not proposing to account for the

facts themselves within the limits of a single study. The

Chevalier Ramsay never spoke of the Templars: his affirmation was

that the hypothetical building confraternity of Palestine united

ultimately with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; that it

became established in various countries of Europe as the Crusaders

drifted back; and that its chief centre in the thirteenth century

was Kilwinning in Scotland. But the French or otherwise German

Masonic mind went to work upon this thesis, and in presenting the

Craft with the credentials of Knightly connections it substituted

the Order of the Temple for the chivalry chosen by Ramsay. The

Battle of Lepanto and the Siege of Vienna had invested the annals

of the St. John Knighthood with a great light of valour; but this

was as little and next to nothing in comparison with the

talismanic attraction which for some reason attached to the

Templar name and was obviously thrice magnified when the

proposition arose that the great chivalry had continued to exist

in secret from the days of Philippe le Bel even to the second half

of the eighteenth century. There were other considerations,

however, which loomed largely, and especially in regard to the

sudden proscription which befell the Order in 1307. Of the trial

which followed there were records available to all, in successive

editions of the French work of Dupuy, first published in 1685; in

the German Historical Tractatus of Petrus Puteamus published at

Frankfort in 1665; in Gurther's Latin Historia Tempiarsorum of

1691; and in yet other publications prior to 1750. There is not a

little evidence of one impression which was produced by these

memorials, the notion, namely, of an unexplored realm of mystery

extending behind the charges. It was the day of Voltaire, and it

happened that a shallow infidelity was characterised by the kind

of licence which fosters intellectual extravagance, by a leaning

in directions which are generally termed superstitious- though

superstition itself was pilloried- and in particular by attraction

towards occult arts and supposed hidden knowledge. Advanced

persons were ceasing to believe in the priest but were disposed to

believe in the sorcerer, and the Templars had been accused of

magic, of worshipping a strange idol, the last suggestion- for

some obscure reason- being not altogether indifferent to many who

had slipped the anchor of their faith in God. Beyond these

frivolities and the foolish minds that cherished them, there were

other persons who were neither in the school of a rather cheap

infidelity nor in that of common superstition, but who looked

seriously for light to the East and for its imagined traditional

wisdom handed down from past ages. They may have been dreamers

also, but they were less or more zealous students after their own

manner; within their proper measures, and the Templar Chivalry

drew them because they deemed it not unlikely that its

condemnation by the paramount orthodoxy connoted a suspicion that

the old Knighthood had learned in Palestine more than the West

could teach. Out of such elements were begotten some at least of

the Templar Rites and they grew from more to more, till this

particular aspect culminated in the Templar dramas of Werner, in

which an Order concealed through the ages and perpetuated through

saintly custodians reveals to a chosen few among Knights Templar

some part of its secret doctrine-the identity of Christ and Horus,

of Mary the Mother of God, and Isis the Queen of Heaven. The root

of these dreams on doctrine and myth transfigured through the

ages- with a heart of reality behind it- will be found, as it

seems to me, in occult derivations from Templar Ritual which

belong to circa 1782 and are still in vigilant custody on the

continent of Europe. I mention this lest it should be thought that

the intimations of a German poet, though he was an active member

of the Strict Observance, were mere inventions of an imaginative

mind.

There is no historical evidence for the existence of any

Templar perpetuation story prior to the Oration of Ramsay, just as

there is no question that all documents produced by the French

non-Masonic Order of the Temple, founded in the early years of the

nineteenth century, are inventions of that period and are

fraudulent like the rest of its claim, its list of Grand Masters

included. There is further- as we have observed- no evidence of

any Rite or Degree of Masonic Chivalry prior to 1737, to which

date is referred the discourse of Ramsay. That this was the

original impetus which led to their production may be regarded as

beyond dispute, and it was the case especially with Masonic

Templar revivals. Their thesis was his thesis varied. For example,

according to the Rite of the Strict Observance the proscribed

Order was carried by its Marshal, Pierre d'Aumont, who escaped

with a few other Knights to the Isles of Scotland, disguised as

Operative Masons. They remained there and under the same veil the

Templars continued to exist in secret from generation to

generation under the shadow of the mythical Mount Heredom of

Kilwinning. To whatever date the old dreams ascribe it, when

Emblematic Freemasonry emerged it was- ex hypothesi -a product of

the union between Knights Templar and ancient Scottish Masonry.

Such is the story told.

The Strict Observance was founded by Baron von Hund in Germany

between about 1751 and 1754 or 1755, and is usually regarded as

the first Masonic Chivalry which put forward the story of Templar

perpetuation. I have accepted this view on my own part, but

subject to his claim at its value- if any- that he had been made a

Knight of the Temple in France, some twelve years previously. The

question arises, therefore, as to the fact or possibility of

antecedent Degrees of the kind in that country, and we are

confronted at once by many stories afloat concerning the Chapter

of Clermont, the foundation of which at Paris is referred to

several dates. It was in existence, according to Yarker, at some

undetermined period before 1742, for at that date its Masonic

Rite, consisting of three Degrees superposed on those of the

Craft, was taken to Hamburg. A certain Von Marshall, whose name

belongs to the history of the Strict Observance, had been admitted

in the previous year, Von Hund himself following in 1743- not at

Hamburg, but at Paris- for all of which no authority is cited and

imagination may seem to have been at work. But some of the

statements, including those of other English writers, are

referable to a source in Thory's Acta Latamorum . When Woodford

speaks of Von Hund's admission into Templar Masonry at Clermont as

not a matter of hypothesis, but of certain knowledge, he is

dependent on the French historian, according to whom the German

Baron was made a Mason at Paris in 1742. The Chapter of Clermont

was founded in that city so late as 1754, and some time

subsequently Von Hund retunied thither, with the result that he

derived Templar teaching from Clermont, on which he built up the

Observance system. But, whatever the point is worth, this story is

not only at issue with that of Von Hund himself, but with the

current chronology of the Observance. To involve matters further,

the Chapter is reported otherwise to have derived its Templar

element from something unspecified at Lyons which is referred to

1738. The utmost variety of statement will be found, moreover, as

to the content of the Clermont Rite, the Templar character of

which has been also challenged. It is proposed otherwise that the

Chapter was founded on a scale of considerable magnitude, that it

was installed in a vast building, and that it attracted the higher

classes of French Freemasons, which notwithstanding it ceased to

exist in 1758, being absorbed by the Council of Emperors

established in that year for the promulgation of a different Grade

system.

I am in a position to reflect some light for the relief of

these complications by reference to Dutch archives which have come

to my knowledge. The date of the Chapter's foundation remains

uncertain, but it was in activity between 1756 and 1763, so that

it was not taken over- as Gould suggests- by those Masonic

Emperors to whom we are indebted for the first form of the

Scottish Rite, Ancient and Accepted. It is not impossible that its

foundation is referable to the first of these dates, when it

superposed on the three Craft Grades as follows: (I) Grade of

Scottish Master of St. Andrew of the Thistle, being the Fourth

Grade of Masonry, "in which allegory dissolves"; (2) Grade of

Sublime Knight of God and of his Temple, being the Fifth and Last

Grade of Free Masonry. At a later period, however, it became the

Seventh Grade of the Rite, owing to the introduction of an Elect

Degree which took the number 5 under the title of Knight of the

Eagle, followed by an Illustrious Degree, occupying the sixth

place and denominated Knight of the Holy Sepulchre. The Grade

final in both enumerations- otherwise Knight of God- presented a

peculiar, as it was also an early version of the perpetuation

story, from which it follows that the Clermont Rite was Templar.

I have so far failed to trace any copy of the Ritual in this

country with the exception of that which has been placed recently

in my hands, an example of the discoveries that await research in

continental archives. The Templar element- which may be called

the historical part- is combined with a part of symbolism, for

though allegory is said to be abandoned in the Fourth Degree, its

spiritual sister is always present in Ritual. The aspect which it

assumes in the present case is otherwise known in Masonry, the

Chapter representing the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, with its

twelve gates, as a tabernacle of God with men. The Candidate is

represented therefore as seeking the light of glory and a perfect

recompense, while that which he is promised is an end of toils and

trials. He is obligated as at the gates of the City and is

promised the Grand Secret of those who abide therein. The City is-

spiritually speaking- in the world to come, and the reward of

chivalry is there; but there is a reward also on earth within the

bonds of the Order, because this is said to be divine and

possessed of the treasures of wisdom. The kind of wisdom and the

nature of the Great Secret is revealed in the Perpetuation Story,

and so far as I am aware offers the only instance of such a claim

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