In reality, the numerous knights who declared that they had begged their initiator to dispense them from the ceremony of the denial of the cross, or who tried to escape its consequences by a mental restriction, could not have had the veritable explanation without also knowing the secrets of the Order, and those secrets were reserved for another initiation, on entry to the interior order.
The action of spitting on the cross signified the deliverance of the Templar with regard to the Roman Church, which he would not longer serve henceforth in spirit. In the same way that the Assassins, enemies of official Islam, prescribed to their disciples of the first degree the rigorous observance of the Koran, the Order of the Temple preached a Christianity rigorous in form. But in spirit, the link that united each member of the Order to the Church was broken by the initiatory ceremony. He was attached to a higher Church, to a Christ who could not die on the cross, and there would come a day, when it was necessary to fight the Pope of Rome and his bishops, when each of them would be obliged to remember his initiation as a living act.
The Templars were, in fact, so detached from the Catholic Church that they did not make use of consecrated hosts in the mass, and they received the confessions of their visitors and preachers, who were often laymen.
The accusation of sodomy weighed as heavily against them as that of heresy. It is not that sodomy was not very widespread in the Middle Ages. It seems to have been more so than in Greece and at least as much as in our day in the society of London, Berlin and Paris. “In the eighth century, according to Alcuin, and probably in the following centuries, every elected bishop had, before being consecrated, to justify himself with regard to these canonical demands: 1., whether he had been a pederast; 2., whether he had been in criminal commerce with a nun; 3., whether he had been in criminal commerce with a four-legged animal.”56 And he had to swear thereafter not to practice any of these “criminal commerces.” In order for a candidate bishop to be interrogated insistently on such actions, they must have been in current usage; but as in our day, everything was tolerated, permitted and encouraged on condition that it was kept quiet and hypocrisy covered it with its mantle of ashes.
A large number of witnesses deposed that at the moment of their entry into the Order they were recommended by their superior to give themselves to sodomy with one another and to neglect the amour of women. That revelation aroused great indignation in society, but that indignation in not really justified. Complete chastity was proposed as an ideal, but that ideal could not be realized at length. Sodomy was a first step, an attenuation of the excitement of the senses. Then again, the Templars were primarily warriors, takers of castles and cities. The custom, at the time, was to rape the women when one entered anywhere as a victor. Those who resisted were killed, and sometimes those one had had and of whom one was weary. That custom was so well-established that a special order of chivalry was founded in the twelfth century for the preservation of women during the marches of armies and the taking of cities. It was perhaps with an objective of human economy that a sage Grand Master of the Temple recommended sodomy as a last resort of carnal desire.
There are analogous examples in the history of mystical sects. Those which deem material life irremediably evil are logical in refusing to perpetuate themselves. They deflect their senses, therefore, by means of rapid actions that bring them a minimum of pleasure and are deprived of consequences. In India about thirty years ago there was a certain sensation when proceedings were instituted against a philosopher who gave advice of a similar nature.
In reality, the cause of all the misunderstandings comes from the enormous importance that religions and society give to the physical relations of individuals with one another. Those relations, the interest of which varies with the age and intelligence of individuals, ought only to matter in the measure to which they develop the sentiment of beauty and love, in the most elevated sense of the word.
But a rule like that of the Order of the Temple supposed in its adherents a sense of moderation and a minimum of spiritual development. It took no account of the baseness of instincts and the total absence of rudiments of spirituality in the great majority of men. The majority of the Templars saw only saw therein permission to take a pleasure previously considered as forbidden. All the Order’s rites were debased.
The kiss on the lips given to the candidate at the moment of reception, which was the communication of breath and strength, as practiced in the Oriental secret societies, became a sign of pleasure. The reception of the knight was very often the pretext for caricaturish and obscene scenes in which the defenders of the Temple and lovers of symbolism cannot discover a hidden meaning under any pretext. During the interrogations in Cahors, a knight named Arnaud reported that as soon as his reception “when he had been made to suffer criminal kisses, the superior who received him had immediately abused him.”57
In Carcassonne, the young Jean de Cassagne confessed that “while a priest of the Order read a psalm, the superior kissed his mouth and lay down on the bench where he was sitting, that they exchanged other kisses, and that the ten knights kissed his navel. Then the superior took a bronze idol from a box….”
The third accusation was concerned with that idol. It was named Baphomet.58 The one found in Paris had a serial number, because there was one in every chapter of the Temple. It was made of bronze, with a long white beard. It was depicted variously, because the knight only saw it for a few moments at the moment of is initiation. It was said that it was a sort of marionette, that it had the face of a cat and also that it represented Satan. Those puerilities contributed to providing a basis for the suspicion of heresy that hung over the Temple. The Knights were convicted in public opinion of worshiping an Oriental divinity.
In reality, Baphomet was a sign of Gnostic origin, destined to summarize the doctrine of the Temple and to remind it of its goal. They worshiped therein neither the image of Jupiter nor that of Mahomet, as was said and believed, but force: the force directed by intelligence that was the ideal of the Temple and was always represented in ancient symbolism by a bearded man wearing a crown. That bearded man is found on seals and medals that had belonged to the Templars. It was for them what the rose in the middle of the cross was to the Rosicrucians, the symbol of the superior idea to which they had devoted their life. The linen cord that was given to the new knight, which he was recommended to wear under his garments, must have touched Baphomet, because it represented the chain that linked the man to his ideal.
THE FALL OF THE ORDER
I shall not recount in detail the proceedings instituted against the Templars, which lasted seven years. Torture had immediately extracted the expected confessions of heresy from a large number of them. Even the Grand Master had not been able to resist it. His confessions must, however, have been falsified by the three cardinals who heard them, for he did not recognize them when they were read back to him, and he declared that he preferred the procedures of the Saracens “who immediately cut off the head of the accused.”
Clement V appeared resistant at first before the grandeur of the injustice, but he was linked by interest to the King of France. He also coveted the spoils of the Templars, in order to satisfy the demands of the beautiful Brunissende, Comtesse de Foix.
What is particularly striking about the trial is the terror inspired by the King’s justice. No one dared to raise his voice to defend the Templars. After two years of equivocations and preliminary tortures, a pontifical commission is solemnly installed at the Archbishopric of Paris and sits there every day to hear the defense. Every day an usher appears on the threshold of the Archbishop’s palace and cries to the people: “If anyone wants to defend the Order of the Militia of the Temple he has only to present himself.” But no one does. The days go by; the ceremony is repeated for four months.
Finally, a man clad in black traverses the silent crowd and asks to be heard for the defense of the Order. A shudder runs through the throng cluttering the streets. The commission stands up, in great emoti
on. The man is named Jean de Melot. He has been a Templar for ten years. He has a great many things to say; he is going to demonstrate the Order’s innocence. When attention is at its peak he declares that he needs immediate nourishment, that he is poor and that he hopes that someone will come to his aid. It is perceived then that he is simple-minded. He is given nourishment, and the commission then renounces hearing any defense of the Order of the Temple.
That defense was never to be produced. It seems that all the knights have become simple-minded, Even the Grand Master declares that he is a man of war, incapable of debating logically. After two years of captivity he asks for a week to reflect and authorization to have a chaplain, who says mass for him. Perhaps the fear of torture threw a veil over the minds of the accused? Perhaps all trace of human intelligence has been suppressed from the interrogations. What remains mysterious in the trial of the Templars is the incapacity of the knights to find a reasonable defense.
Finally, after seven years, Clement V appoints a council to study the affair and judge it. But as the members of the council ask to hear witnesses, to be informed of the case and they seem to want to exonerate the Order, Clement V, by his own authority, declares it suspect of heresy and abolishes it.
A large number of knights were kept in the royal prisons, Philippe le Bel hastened to have condemned to death, by a tribunal under the presidency of the Archbishop of Sens, the brother of his minister Marigny, on whose ferocity he can count, all the Templars that had retracted their initial confessions.
“Near the Abbaye de Saint-Antoine, fifteen or twenty pyres had been lit, not in flames but like as many beds of ardent coals, to burn the culpable individuals gradually. Fifty-four knights were thrown into them.”59
The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and the master of Normandy had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment. At the last minute, however, before the Archbishop of Sens, they abruptly withdrew their confessions. They declared that “the Order was pure and holy, and that they were ready to die to sustain that verity.” They died the same day. Philippe le Bel had them taken to an island in the Seine situated between the King’s gardens and those of the Augustins, where two pyres had been built. The two Templars, says the historian, “had become hideous by virtue of the effects of such a long captivity.” An immense crowd watched the torture.
There was no thick smoke to stifle them, with the consequence that they were burned slowly. As Jacques de Molay was partly consumed, tradition reports that he cried: “Clement, iniquitous judge, I summon you to appear before the tribunal of God in forty days time, and you, Philippe equally unjust, in a year.”
Forty days later, Clement V died of lupus near Avignon. The King of France only survived him by eight months. A Templar from Beaucaire, when he was about to be burned, having encountered Nogaret, the king’s counselor and instigator or the proceedings, on the way, also specified the date of his imminent death for him. Florian and the prior of Montfaucon, who had denounced the Order on his evidence, were murdered within the year.
Those coincidences have been seen as evidence of certain powers of magic that were lent to the Templars. It cannot be explained, however, why those powers were not manifest during the seven years that the proceedings had lasted. Perhaps there is an inferior magic that can only be employed for vengeance.
A legend of the Midi says that in the church of the little Pyrenean village of Gavarnie, nine heads of executed Templars have been preserved. Every 13 October, the anniversary of the Order’s fall, at midnight, a voice resounds in the church and says: “Has the day of the deliverance of Christ’s tomb come?” and the nine heads blink their desiccated eyelids and reply, in a whisper, with their mummified lips: “Not yet!”
The deliverance of the tomb of Christ was originally intended symbolically as the deliverance of the spirit. That legend shows that in the land of the Albigensians, the goal of the Order had been understood, and that even after its destruction, people did not despair of the promised deliverance.
For the papal bull only rendered the Order of Templars secret thereafter. In his prison, Jacques de Molay had designated as his successor Jean-Marc Larmenie of Jerusalem. Thibaut d’Alexandrie succeeded him and since then, the Order has continued to exist, “and the succession of its grandmasters, which includes many illustrious and influential men, has never been interrupted.”60
De Beaujeu, the nephew of Jacques de Molay had received his ashes and possessed the archives and the secrets of the Order. Followed by a few Templars he went to Scotland, where Edward II had conceded lands to them. That little group recognized as leader the master of the freemasons Henry Fitz-Edwin and he formed the Edinburgh lodge. Others went to Sweden. In the centuries that followed, the Templars mingled with freemasonry and played an active role in its development. But the study of that role and its action on the French Revolution is too vast a subject for me to treat it here. I shall only report the last act of the drama, which indicates, if it is true, that the Templar filiation existed in a vivacious fashion among the first elements of the Revolution and that there is a direct relationship of cause and effect between the death of Jacques de Molay and that of Louis XVI.
At the moment when Louis XVI’s head had just fallen from the guillotine, a man who had been seen in all the street demonstrations since the taking of the Bastille ran toward the scaffold, took royal blood in his hands and made the gesture of throwing it over the crowd, crying: “People, I baptize you in the name of Jacques de Molay and liberty!”61
Jacques de Molay was avenged. Perhaps the Order had no longer had any other gal for five centuries than that vengeance. It has only been glimpsed since then in an enfeebled form. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, some of its members attempted to reconstitute it, but in an imperfect manner.
That attempt was made with the assent of Napoléon, who reserved the possibility of extracting the best from the Order and perhaps becoming its Grand Master, when the Order had recovered a measure of social importance. He sent an infantry regiment to form a line in front of the church of Saint-Paul Saint-Antoine in 1808 when a funeral ceremony was held for the anniversary of the death of Jacques de Molay. The new Templars were gathered in that ceremony and they sat on thrones in the church. They wore a chlamys edged with ermine and had pectoral crosses, epaulettes, armbands, fringed belts, and white boots with red heels. Their first concern, after the distribution of titles and dignities, had been to compose sumptuous uniforms. That is, alas, a characteristic of many sects that pretend to seek true spirituality to believe that an initiate ought to wear a costume and that the sign of the elevation of the spirit is proportional to the diversity of symbols, and the choice of colors and fabrics. One finds the search for that facile superiority in academies, philharmonic or mutualist societies, and other groups in which human vanity is expressed.
The new Order of the Temple was modified a little later under the direction of the physician Fabré-Palaprat, who attempted to restore the Johannite religion. In that he was in the true Templar tradition of Theoclet and Hugues de Payens. He based his beliefs on a mysterious manuscript he had found, called the Leviticon, which supposedly contained the secret doctrines of the Templars of the thirteenth century. But nothing resulted from his effort, except that new dignities and uniforms were distributed.
The Order of the Temple has now disappeared, and that disappearance marks the complete failure of its high aims. The Church of John, the true Christian Church, has lost its heroic champions. The deliverance of the spirit, the organization of the world by a group of initiated sages, as well as the attestation of the nine dead heads under the brick and slate of Gavarnie, was not and never will be realized. The men in white mantles who had a red cross over the heart and who might have attempted it perished in the royal prisons of Philippe le Bel after having been dishonored by the interrogations of Dominican Inquisitors.
But the Spirit could not be delivered by the Templars. A grand design cannot be accomplished by that which is founded on hypocrisy.
The Order of the Temple instructed its knights in the practices of the narrowest Catholicism, as the Order of Assassins did for the rules of the Koran. Both orders wanted, however, to destroy the church that they venerated in appearance, in order to erect another, more perfect, on its debris. A lie is never solid. The Mongol horsemen of Hulagu and the foresight of Philippe le Bel put an end to those two great forces of the Orient and the Occident.
If the Templars had triumphed, history would have been modified in an unforeseeable manner. They had understood the necessity of the union of religions. Their narrow links with Islam and its philosophers had taught them to respect the civilization of their enemies and even to adopt it. They embraced in their social projects the elevation of the third order. Who can tell what might have become of the states of Europe in the hands of that aristocratic army? Perhaps they would have been transformed by an element of sublime progress. Perhaps—and it is more probable—they would have been curbed under the iron tyranny that those who possess strength always exercise.
It was the mystic knights of the First Crusade who had received the message to begin with. They had wanted to transmit it by the sword. By the noble verities that they had learned in Jerusalem were incomplete. They did not know that the word loses its virtue with the vapor of the blood that is shed on its behalf. There is a certain light of the spirit that dies on contact with the metal of a breastplate and the steel of a sword. And if the person who wants to transmit it is enveloped by the magnetism of gold, that light becomes shadow. Certain verities, in order to keep their original purity, need to be expressed by the lips of poor men, and their annunciatory sign ought to be made with a hand blanched by asceticism and long invocations.
Whether the corruptions of which the Templars were accused were true or false, and whether the initiations had degenerated into the scenes of collective amour that one finds in so many mystical sects, is of little importance. It does not matter whether the eyes of Baphomet were luminous carbuncles, or whether the denial of Christ affected one form or another. Their true crime was not enunciated in the proceedings. How could it be? It was committed on a daily basis by Philippe le Bel and Clement V.
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