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The Cross and the Sword  

The Templars have always been surrounded by legends and mystery.

Official history has been paralleled by different tales, sometime supported by historical facts but often just the result of galloping fantasies.

Disciplines such as Esotericism, Magic, Alchemy and Free Masonry which are characterized by secrecy and usually reserved to a select few, have been frequently matched with the monks-soldiers: why?  

The militia Christi was created in 1118 by Hugues de Payns to defend Jerusalem and to ensure protection to the pilgrims visiting The Holy Land. 

They were called milites templi or Templars because Baldwin ll, King of Jerusalem, accepted their services and assigned them the Al-Aqsa Mosque, thought to be on the exact location of legendary "Templum Salomonis".

Thanks to Bernard de Clairvaux (St Bernard), in 1128 Hugues de Payns obtained the approval of the Church and the Templars were recognized as an Order.

Rapidly, due to the Pope's protection and to the authorities' grants, the Order saw a fast growth and in a few decades it became an international power structure which prospered for nearly two centuries. It included an army, a fleet, a logistic net throughout Europe and the Middle East as well as a wealthy banking system.

The enormous political and financial power achieved by the Templars, the envy it created and the greed of Philip the Fair, were the reasons for their destruction.

The King of France owed the Order considerable loans: when in 1305 his sponsored-Pope was elected, he felt secure enough to launch his campaign against the Templars to take their treasure. He used the only crime which allowed a king to confiscate properties, heresy.

On October 13, 1307 all Templars in France were arrested: under torture most of them confessed apostasy, devil worship, idolatry and systematic homosexuality.       Many of them were publicly burned, other spent the rest of their lives in a jail or joined others religious organization or simply disappeared and by 1314 the Order was suppressed all around Europe.

The number of stories and myths has considerably grown since and following are some of the most suggestive ones.

In 1314 Jacques de Molay, the last Master of Temple, minutes before burning at the stake, supposedly set a curse upon his prosecutors. Within the end of the year both the Pope and Philip the Fair died.

Some stories are related to the allegations on which the trial was based: at their initiations they supposedly spat on the cross, denied Christ, idolized a bearded head called Baphomet, exchanged kisses on their lower back and promised to relieve all sexual desires with their brothers.

Despite these confessions, which arose out of tortures, it is hard to understand how such powerful, proud and well trained knights were arrested without opposing any resistences.

According to Gauthier Walther's Cavalry and the secret aspects of History, the Templars accepted the persecution to allow a few of them to carry on (thanks to their familiarity with enormous fonts of power), with their plan to conquest the entire world within the year 2000.

These fonts of power were the knowledge and wisdom brought back from the East. These were symbolized by a circle, the shape of Templar churches, which later became a pivotal of Freemasonry mythology.

A mythology built on secrecy, initiations and rites which survived over the centuries and spread all over Europe. Sometimes it generated tragic consequences: in 1994 in Switzerland and Canada all members of the Order of the Temple of  the Sun,

self-proclaimed New Templars and lead by Luc Jouret, committed suicide or were killed in a mass rite of initiation to a new life.

According to the Hermetism philosopher P.V.Piobb, Nostradamus' prophecies were just a cryptic list of suggestions left by the Templars to those descendants able to decrypt, understand and finally obey them.

To decrypt is also the mystery of La Rochelle, a little fishing village on the Atlantic Gulf of Guascogne in France, which was turned by the Knights into an important, well-protected port where seven of their main commercial roads met. One of the most intriguing theories is they used it, secretly, as a landing-stage to sail to America.  

In his book The Sword and the Grail, Andrew Sinclair has proposed a slightly new myth around those Templars who supposedly escaped from persecution recovering in Scotland and taking with them their treasure.

Here they helped Robert Bruce in his successful war against England and they founded and sustained the St. Clair (Sinclair) family which was later linked with Freemasonry.

Sinclair assumed they also sailed to North America where they founded an unsuccessful colony. As it died out, instead of sailing back to Europe with the treasure, they decided to hide it.

 For this purpose they built the complex of "Money Pit" on Oak Island (New Scotland) and they marked the site using arcane symbolism involving rocks laid out in a cross shape.

But the most fascinating myth concerning the milites Templi is their involvement with the  legend of The Holy Grail. 

The legend says it was the cup used by Jesus Christ in the Last Supper and brought by Joseph of Arimathaea to Britain where later King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table began the Quest.

Within the 12th and 13th centuries, while Templars saw their fortunes at their heights, literature played an important role in presenting them as guardianship of the Graal. In his poem Parzifal (1220) Wolfram von Eschenbach attempted to tell the Grail was still around while he was writing, and guarded by the Knights.

The search of the Grail (whatever it might be) is endless. Is it really a miraculous cup or, according to generations of alchemist, a prodigious stone which enables those who use it to turn any metal into gold?

It is certainly easier to believe it symbolizes the eternal search of how perfectible humans are and under this point of view and considering their role in Medieval history the Templar Knights can be considered the guardians of the Holy Grail.