by Michael Haag
Well before the end of the Order, the Knights Templar were entering into the realm of myth. The first mention of the Templars in literature came in about 1220 in Parzival by the German knight and poet Wolfram von Eschenbach. He based his work on Chrétien des Troyes’ romance Perceval, The Story of the Grail, begun in 1181 and left unfinished at his death in 1190. Chrétien’s association with Troyes may be significant: it was the capital of the counts of Champagne who played an important role in the founding of the Templars and also in promoting their great champion Bernard of Clairvaux. Certainly Troyes represented a link with the East through Chrétien’s patroness, the countess Marie of Champagne, who was the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Eleanor was the lively young wife of Louis VII, the incompetent leader of the Second Crusade; she accompanied him on the venture, and upon her arrival in the East lost no time in embarking on a flagrant affair with her uncle Raymond of Antioch. She later married Henry II, king of England. Bernard of Clairvaux did not much approve of the free-spirited Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he found flighty and indecorous. But for a poet she made good copy, and it is not hard to imagine her inspiring Chrétien when he invented the character of Guinevere in his earlier work Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, which he wrote specifically at Marie’s request.
The hint of a Templar link in Chrétien’s romance was made manifest in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, in which he makes the Knights Templar the guardians of the Grail. Eschenbach had visited Outremer in about 1200 and he set sections of his poem in the East. His Templars are pure warriors, defenders of the sacred territories which contain the Grail, just as the real Templars defended the Holy Land:
[They] are continually riding out on sorties in quest of adventure. Whether these same Templars reap trouble or renown they bear it for their sins. I will tell you how they are nourished. They live from a stone whose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called “Lapsit exillis”. By virtue of the stone the Phoenix is burned to ashes, in which he is reborn.
Eschenbach explains that Lapsit exillis, the name given to the Grail, is a stone that was once set in Lucifer’s crown but which fell with him from heaven, and which serves the Templars as an elixir of life–a notion that would not be entirely out of place in a dualist cosmology.
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The Grail Quest
The Grail was invented in the late twelfth century by Chrétien de Troyes: no mention of a Grail had ever been made before. Curiously, there was nothing explicitly religious about Chrétien’s Grail; he did not write about it as the cup or chalice at the Last Supper. For that matter he did not describe it as a cup or chalice at all, but rather as a serving dish, which is the usual and original meaning of the Old French word graal. But there is something wonderful about the Grail’s first appearance in the pages of Chrétien’s story at the beginning of a rich man’s feast, and all the more wonderful and strange because Chrétien never finished his story. This is how it makes its first appearance on the page:
Then two other squires entered holding in their hands candelabra of pure gold, crafted with enamel inlays. The young men carrying the candelabra were extremely handsome. In each of the candelabra there were at least ten candles burning. A maiden accompanying the two young men was carrying a grail with her two hands; she was beautiful, noble, and richly attired. After she had entered the hall carrying the grail the room was so brightly illumined that the candles lost their brilliance like stars and the moon when the sun rises. (Arthurian Romances, Penguin, 1991)
What is tantalising about this appearance of the Grail is that Perceval, the hero of the romance, knows exactly what it is, but he fails to tell us before the story breaks off (when Chrétien dies). Is the story allegorical? People have argued over that point for more than eight hundred years. And if allegorical, is the allegory religious? That too has never been resolved. But this haunting image was soon inspiring writers to complete the tale–among them Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in Parzival, his thirteenth-century German adaptation, introduced the Knights Templar to literature by making them guardians of the Grail.
Chrétien de Troyes was writing when medieval Western society, so attached to its tradition, was opening onto a wider world, the world of the Mediterranean, the world of the East, to worlds of ideas and beliefs that it was discovering or rediscovering, not least on account of the Crusades. Writing about the Grail meant writing about this cultural and spiritual quest, and yet strangely it has always been a genre, regardless of its religious overtones, that has belonged to secular writers, never to the Church. And so, free from doctrine and canon, the Grail has been endlessly reinvented down to the present time.
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Templars and Witchcraft
It is curious that it was precisely as Europe was moving out of the Middle Ages and into the ages of awakening and reason that the first sinister mystifications about the Templars were developed in both the popular and learned imaginations. The story begins in 1487 with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, ironically one of the earliest books to be printed–the invention of the printing press is usually taken to mark the end of the Middle Ages.
There had always been a belief in evil spirits, but there had also been a confidence that the Church could shield believers from their influence; exorcism was routinely practised by the clergy to banish unclean spirits, while external threats, such as the Muslim conquests, would be countered by the Crusades and the knightly class, including the military orders. But the failure of the Crusades and the loss of confidence in the Church helped set off a pathological fear that demons were taking possession of Christian people.
By the end of the fifteenth century the fear of witchcraft had grown into an epidemic which forced the Church to intervene. In 1484 a Papal bull, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus, legitimised the belief in witches and granted permission to bishops and secular authorities to prosecute them if there were no representatives from the Inquisition. The Malleus Maleficarum was published three years later; written by two experienced and enthusiastic Dominican witch-hunters, it established the procedural rules for witchcraft trials and quickly became notorious. The title, which translates as ‘The Hammer of the Witches’, in effect means the persecution of witches–a term which was applied to anyone from heretics, devil-worshippers and practitioners of magic to prostitutes and superstitious old women. By a chance remark made in a book published a generation later, the Templars became associated with this murky and paranoid world of the esoteric.
The book was De Occulta Philosophia; it was by a German, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and after its publication in 1531 it became the most widely read and influential of the Renaissance magical texts. Agrippa was a serious humanist scholar whose interests spilled over into folklore and the occult. The purpose of his book, he said, was ‘to distinguish between the good and holy science of magic and the scandalous and impious practises of black magic, and to restore the former’s good name’. In the process he examined the various ways in which the powers emanating from spirits and demons could be harnessed and controlled. And then he wrote these fateful lines: ‘It is well known that evil demons can be attracted by bad and profane arts, in the manner in which Psellus relates that the Gnostic magicians used to practise, who used to carry out disgusting and foul abominations, like those formerly used in the rites of Priapus and in the service of the idol called Panor, to whom people used to sacrifice with their private parts bared. Nor were they much different, if what we read is truth and not fantasy, from the detestable heresy of the Templars; and similar things are known about the witches and their senile craziness in wandering into offences of this sort.’
By placing the Templars alongside witches as his two examples of perverted Christian magicians Agrippa thrust the order into the phantasmagoria of occult forces which were the subject of the persecuting craze for which the Malleus Maleficarum was a handbook. Suddenly the Templars were raised from the depths of half-forgotten failures and became the focus
of the darkest disturbing forces in the European mind–its victims or its masters. In this way the Templars entered the Renaissance and were to advance into the Age of Enlightenment.
Solomon’s Temple and the Freemasons
At a time when most workers were tied to the land, masons were freelancers who sought work where they could, and in Scotland and England during the Middle Ages they began to form themselves into mutual help associations. There were two kinds of masons, the ‘rough masons’ who worked in hard stone, laying foundations and raising walls, and the more mobile masons who carved the fine facades on cathedrals from softer stone, freestone as it was called, and these elite masons were called freestone masons, or freemasons for short. As the freemasons travelled round Britain they would stay at lodges, and after the Reformation in the sixteenth century one of their activities at their lodges was to read the Bible. The Catholic Church had discouraged the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, fearing that the Bible would replace the Papacy as the font of authority. This was precisely what Protestants in Scotland and England were eager to do, for the Bible was discovered to have revolutionary implications; for example it spoke of prophets who had overthrown wicked kings, and at the same time it failed to support the notion that the bishop of Rome, that is the Pope, should be the supreme leader of a universal Church.
On the other hand the Protestants decided that the Bible was itself the word of God, and those who were freemasons paid close attention to the Second Book of Chronicles with its description of how Solomon asked Hiram to build the Temple, and to the detailed measurements of the Temple, which God would only have troubled to mention, in their view, because they contained some profound theological truths. The freemasons were particularly impressed by that other Hiram, not Hiram the king of Tyre, but Hiram the widow’s son, the one they called Hiram Abiff. The most remarkable work at Solomon’s Temple had been done by Hiram Abiff, the casting of the enormous basin known as the Sea of Bronze and of the huge bronze pillars known as Jachin and Boaz. As the Bible said, this Hiram was a man ‘filled with wisdom and understanding’.
The efficacy of these freemasons’ mutual assistance associations depended on their exclusivity, that they should be clubs open to freemasons only, and the point was made by developing a system of signs and rituals supposedly passed down from ancient times and by means of which adherents gained access to the private meetings. One such ritual concerned Hiram Abiff, to whom the masons gave a history that went far beyond his brief mention in the Bible. Hiram Abiff, they said, knew the secret of the Temple. Three villains kidnapped Hiram and threatened to kill him if he did not reveal the secret ‘Master’s word’–a term used by the masons in their trade to differentiate the pay and assignments of workers, but also, as the ritual now implied, bearing deeper and mystical significance. But Hiram refused to reveal the secret, and his assailants murdered him.
When Solomon heard about this, he wondered what was Hiram’s secret, and he sent three masons to look for his body, also telling them that if they could not find the secret, then the first thing they saw when they found Hiram’s body should itself become the secret of the Temple. The masons found Hiram Abiff’s coffin, and when they opened it the first thing they saw was his hand–and from this the masons made the handshake and other signs of recognition the new secret. On the basis of this story, the masons developed the ritual by which a Freemason advances through degrees, the first being apprentice mason, the second being entered apprentice, and so to the third degree when he becomes a master mason. Advancing to the third degree requires that the initiate must agree to undergo the sufferings of Hiram Abiff should he ever reveal the Freemasons’ secrets, and that if he ever broke his oath it would be right for his fellow Freemasons to cut out his heart, his liver and his entrails, in the same way as a traitor was disembowelled as part of the process of being hanged, drawn and quartered.
But already these associations of artisan freemasons were undergoing a transition that would alter their fundamental nature. To enhance the standing of their associations, freemasons invited influential people to serve as patrons. This gave the freemasons a social appeal which together with their study of the Bible began to attract an inquiring elite comprising gentlemen and scholars, professionals and merchants, so that by about 1700 these ‘admitted’ or ‘speculative masons’ outnumbered ‘operative masons’, as the artisans were called. In fact the modern institution that we recognise as Freemasonry was born when a group of four London lodges made up of both operative and admitted masons merged in 1717 to create a Grand Lodge. They placed at their head not a practising mason but a gentleman, and never again would a true stonemason ever serve as a Grand Master.
Enlightenment and Mystery
The meaning of the Hiram story is unclear as perhaps it was meant to be, for its true purpose may have been to link the Freemasons with antiquity. For all that educated people of the Enlightenment looked towards the future, they also looked back towards the past for they believed that antiquity had possessed much learning and wisdom that had since been lost, and that it was their duty to recover what they could from biblical and classical times. For example, Sir Isaac Newton made such recovery a major part of his work and attempted for years to decipher the wisdom hidden in biblical prophecy and alchemy. His Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, which described gravitation and the laws of motion, was central to the scientific revolution and the acceptance that rational investigation can reveal the inner workings of nature–and yet Newton was convinced that it was merely a rediscovery of ancient knowledge.
Though Newton, who died in 1727, was never himself a mason, Freemasonry did attract eminent intellectuals, including several members of the Royal Society, in effect the British academy of sciences, men who stood for rationalism and deism, but who also found it entirely appropriate that the Freemasons should identify themselves with the Temple of Solomon, built by Solomon and Hiram Abiff, those mysterious exemplars of ancient wisdom.
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Sir Isaac Newton and the Temple of Solomon
One of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment, the scientist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, wrote something like four hundred and seventy books–many of them on theological subjects and several about the Temple of Solomon. Newton was convinced that Solomon was the greatest philosopher of all time, and he also believed that he owed his own breakthrough formulation of the law of gravity to his close reading of those portions of the Bible, 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles, which give in great detail the measurements of Solomon’s Temple. Moreover Newton saw in those same figures all manner of prophecies of great and terrible events that would take place over the coming four hundred years, including the Second Coming of Christ in 1948.
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Freemasons and Templars
News of the formation of London’s Grand Lodge and the activities of British Freemasons soon spread across Europe. By the 1730s masonic lodges had been founded in the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere, often by representatives of the London Grand Lodge who travelled abroad for the purpose, but sometimes by local residents who were inspired by the Grand Lodge but were not under its direction. But if Freemasonry proved popular in Europe, it was also alien and troubling for some. It did not grow out of the old artisan organisations of France, Germany and elsewhere on the continent, which had long since ceased to exist. Instead it was imported from Britain, home of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that had definitively curtailed the powers of the king and divided authority between the monarchy, Parliament and the judiciary, and that had instituted a degree of religious toleration. Britain was widely admired by the people of Europe as a progressive and tolerant nation, but its institutions and inventions, not least Freemasonry, were deeply distrusted by Europe’s autocratic rulers and the Catholic Church.
Though the Freemasons in Britain were an innocuous and largely middle-class fraternal organisation, whose lodges fulfiled a similar social function as the London coffee house, they acquired a cult of
secrecy and linked this to a mysterious knowledge associated with Solomon’s Temple. Earlier, Agrippa had linked the Templars to witchcraft and occult powers. It remained for these elements to be drawn together into one powerful occultic myth, and this is what happened when the Freemasons were directly linked to the Templars–which happened not in Britain but in continental Europe.
The first step was taken in 1736 or 1737 by a Scotsman called Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite exile living in France who, as chancellor of the French Grand Lodge, introduced a fictitious Crusader background to the Freemasons and notions of aristocratic class. British Freemasonry was democratic in nature; its members included artisans and aristocrats, professional men, learned men and middle-class traders, all content to rub shoulders with one another. But neither rubbing shoulders nor belonging to an institution that had grown from workingmen’s beginnings appealed to the upper strata of French society. The gentry and nobility of France wanted recognition of social distinctions, and they wanted it reinforced by style, nostalgia and romance. Ramsay gave it to them by the bucketful, suggesting that the stonemasons had also been knightly warriors in the Holy Land, and soon he had turned the French Freemasons into an ancient chivalrous international secret society. ‘Our ancestors, the Crusaders, who had come from all parts of Christendom to the Holy Land, wanted to group persons from every nation in a single spiritual confraternity’, Ramsay announced in his Oration to Saint John’s Lodge in Paris, variously dated 27 December 1736 or 21 March 1737.
In Ramsay’s version of the past, the Crusaders had attempted to restore the Temple of Solomon in a hostile environment and had devised a system of secret signs and rituals to protect themselves against their Muslim enemy, who otherwise would infiltrate their positions and cut their throats. Ramsay also said that at the collapse of Outremer the Crusaders returned to their homelands in Europe and established Freemason lodges there. But their lodges and their rites were neglected over time and it was only among Scotsmen that the Freemasons preserved their former splendour:
