The Templar Paradox, From Political Target to Enduring Myth

“ Two years later the king took refuge in the Temple from the violence of the Paris mob, [18] and so late as the spring of 1307 was present at the reception of a new Templar. [19]
Yet for some two years past the king had been plotting treacherous attack on the order. His motives are clear: he had used every expedient to raise money, had robbed and expelled the Jews and the Lombard bankers, had debased the coinage; the suppression of the Templars would at once rescue him from their unwelcome tutelage and replenish his coffers. He cherished also another ambition. ”

“ Never had the order of the Temple been to all appearance more powerful than immediately before its ruin. Sovereign power, in the sense of that of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia Suppression of the order.or the Knights of St John in Rhodes and later in Malta, it had never possessed; but its privileges and immunities constituted it a church within the church and—in France at least—a state within the state. Philip IV., indeed, in pursuance of his policy of centralizing power in the crown, had from 1287 onwards made tentative efforts to curtail the power and wealth of the order ”

“ Philip, whose animosity pursued Boniface even beyond the grave, wished to be revenged on all who had taken his side; moreover, the immense wealth of the Templars, which he reckoned on making his own if he could destroy them, strongly attracted the king, who had already tasted of the sweets of the spoliation of the Lombards and the Jews; and he probably, also, feared the obstacle to the perfect establishment of despotism which might be offered by a numerous, noble, and wealthy society, such as the Templars formed. ”

“ We may believe that king Philip would never have taken away their lives if he might have taken their lands without putting them to death, but the mischief was, he could not get the honey unless he burnt the bees.” [432]
King Philip, the pope, and the European sovereigns, appear to have disposed of all the personalty of the Templars, the ornaments, jewels, and treasure of their churches and chapels, and during the period of five years, over which the proceedings against the order extended, they remained in the actual receipt of the vast rents and revenues of the fraternity. ”

“ That these acts of violence were committed without remonstrance or redress indicates that the power of the Templars had greatly diminished. These considerations—coupled with the intolerable pride of the knights and their splendour, which mocked the smaller gentry—were sufficient to account for the unpopularity of the Order and for the general acquiescence in its suppression. And with societies as well as with men when they become unpopular, sinister rumours began to be whispered, crimes began to be alleged, words began to be reported. ”

“ The act of accusation against the Templars, drawn up in the name of the pope, ran thus. At the time of their reception they were made to deny God, Christ, the Virgin, &c.; in particular to declare that Christ was not the true God, but a false prophet, who had been crucified for his own crimes, and not for the redemption of the world. They spat and trampled on the cross, especially on Good Friday. They worshipped a cat which sometimes appeared in their chapters. Their priests, when celebrating mass, did not pronounce the words of consecration. ”

“ When a child was born of a virgin to a Templar it was roasted, and of its fat an ointment was made wherewith to anoint the idol worshipped in the chapters, to which, according to other rumors, human sacrifices were offered. Such were the stories which passed from mouth to mouth and served to intensify popular abhorrence. [280]
It is, perhaps, necessary at this point to discuss the still mooted question as to the guilt or innocence of the Order. Disputants have from various motives been led to find among the Templars Manichæan, Gnostic, and Cabalistic errors justifying their destruction. ”

“ After a long and most extraordinary tirade of this kind, Philip accuses the Templars of insulting Jesus Christ, and making him suffer more in those days than he had suffered formerly upon the cross; of renouncing the christian religion; of mocking the sacred image [Pg 201] of the Saviour; of sacrificing to idols; and of abandoning themselves to impure practices and unnatural crimes. He characterises them as ravishing wolves in sheep’s clothing; a perfidious, ungrateful, idolatrous society, whose words and deeds were enough to pollute the earth and infect the air ”

“ It is absurd to suppose that men of intellect adored a monstrous idol called Baphomet, or recognized Mahomet as an inspired prophet. Their symbolism, invented ages before, to conceal what it was dangerous to avow, was of course misunderstood by those who were not adepts, and to their enemies seemed to be pantheistic. The calf of gold, made by Aaron for the Israelites, was but one of the oxen under the laver of bronze, and the Karobim on the Propitiatory, misunderstood. The symbols of the wise always become the idols of the ignorant multitude. ”

“ BAPHOMET, the imaginary symbol or idol which the Knights Templars were accused of worshipping in their secret rites. The term is supposed to be a corruption of Mahomet, who in several medieval Latin poems seems to be called by this name. ”

“ Men did not pause to remember that Mahomedanism is the great exception, being as it is a protest against all idol-worship whatsoever; so that it was a signal injustice to call an idol a 'mawmet' or a Mahomet, and idolatry 'mammetry.'
A misnomer such as this may remind us of the immense importance of possessing such names for things as shall not involve or suggest an error. We have already seen this in the province of the moral life; but in other regions also it nearly concerns us. ”

“ Upon hearing of this Philip immediately ordered the rearrest of the Templars, and, proceeding against them as relapsed heretics, they were condemned to be burned alive. In Paris alone one hundred and thirteen suffered this terrible punishment, and many more were burned in other towns. In Spain, Portugal, and Germany, proceedings were taken against the order; their property was confiscated, and in some cases torture was used; but it is remarkable that it was only in France, and in those places where Philip's influence was powerful, that any Templar was actually put to death. ”

“ On the 18th of March, the pope wrote to the kings of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Portugal, complaining of the omission to torture the Templars in their dominions. “The bishops and delegates,” says the holy pontiff, “have imprudently neglected these means of obtaining the truth; we therefore expressly order them to employ TORTURE against the knights, that the truth may be more readily and completely obtained!” The order for TORTURING the Templars was transmitted to the patriarch of Constantinople, the bishop of Negropont, and the duke of Achaia ”

“ The introduction of the use of torture impressed the popular imagination with special horror, and it was widely believed that confessions were habitually extorted by insufferable torment from rich men whose faith was unblemished. The cruel provisions which brought confiscation on the descendants of heretics, moreover, were peculiarly hard to endure, for ruin impended over every one against whom the inquisitor might see fit to produce from his records evidence of ancestral heresy. ”

“ His crime of maltreating the Host was public and unquestionable, but he had varied in his statements as to his faith; the consulta de fe was unanimous in ordering torture to discover possible accomplices, but some of the members desired a special additional torture in order to confirm him in the faith and save his soul. [32]
That witnesses should be tortured, in order to obtain or confirm their testimony, is an abuse which, repulsive as it may seem to us, has been, with more or less disguise, a practice wherever torture has been used. ”

“ Hence it was that under paganism a limit was imposed to the torture which could be administered; but, when Christianity had become predominant throughout Europe, torture was developed with a cruelty never before known. There had been evolved a doctrine of "excepted cases"—these "excepted cases" being especially heresy and witchcraft; for by a very simple and logical process of theological reasoning it was held that Satan would give supernatural strength to his special devotees—that is, to heretics and witches—and therefore that, in dealing with them, there should be no limit to the torture. ”

“ From the confessions wrung from their victims by torture and suggestive questions, they obtained a full, dogmatic system of compacts and intrigues with the devil, of Succubis and Incubis, of witch ointment, broomsticks, and ovenforks, of witches’ sabbaths, Walpurgis nights, and flights up chimneys. Soon this illusion spread like an epidemic, and thousands throughout Germany and all other Catholic countries, mostly old women, but also some young maidens, were subjected to the most horrible tortures, and after confession had been extorted, to death by fire. ”

“ We shall see that occasionally tribunals abused the use of torture, but the popular impression that the inquisitorial torture-chamber was the scene of exceptional refinement in cruelty, of specially ingenious modes of inflicting agony, and of peculiar persistence in extorting confessions, is an error due to sensational writers who have exploited credulity. ”

“ When in captivity to the infidels, the Templars died sooner than renounce their religion. They declared their readiness to defend their innocence in every way, and against every person except the pope and the king, demanded to be brought personally before the general council, required that those who had quitted the order and deposed against it should be [Pg 308] kept in close custody till their truth or falsehood should be ascertained, and that no layman should be present to intimidate the accused when under examination. ”

“ The vulgar notion that the Templars were as wicked as they were fearless and brave, has not yet been entirely exploded; but it is hoped that the copious account of the proceedings against the order in this country, given in the ninth and tenth chapters of the ensuing volume, will tend to dispel many unfounded prejudices still entertained against the fraternity, and excite emotions of admiration for their constancy and courage, and of pity for their unmerited and cruel fate. ”

“ There is not one that is not to their credit. The old saying, “Drink like a Templar,” has no echo in the mountains of Bigorre. Many of their churches are still standing, objects of interest to the archæologist, and of devotion to the pious. There are six or seven skulls shown at Gavarnie, said to be of the martyred Templars, and every year, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Order, a knight armed from top to toe, and wearing the great white mantle of the Order, appears in the churchyard and cries three times: “Who will defend the Holy Temple? ”

“ Religion, valor, romance, and literature have all lent enchantment to the place. Built and inhabited by the Knights Templars, the resort of kings and nobles of highest lineage, the home of generations of law-students and literary men like Burke, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Lamb, and associated with Shakespeare and many a romance, who could enter its quiet alleys, and ramble about its courts and gardens, without being stirred to the depths of his soul? ”

“ To render it, if possible, suspect even to its patrons Rome denied the humanity of its aims and the boasted antiquity of its origin. According to the stories circulated by the priests, which excited by their fears existed solely in their imagination, the Freemasons were the successors of the old Knights Templars sworn to avenge the abolition of that order by the bull of Pope Clement V and the death of its Grand Master, Jacques Molay, burnt alive by King Philip the Fair in the fourteenth century. But their vengeance was not to be limited to the destruction of the Papacy and the French monarchy ”

“ History, again, is an agent powerful, and becoming more powerful, in shaping men’s minds, and through their minds their actions in the world; now one of the most prominent faults of historians is that, through want of familiarity with the principles of myth-development, they cannot apply systematically to ancient legend the appropriate test for separating chronicle from myth, but with few exceptions are apt to treat the mingled mass of tradition partly with undiscriminating credulity and partly with undiscriminating scepticism. ”

“ So rife in our own day is this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth with a builder and a purpose. ”

“ No matter what modifications or alterations the general system may have undergone,—no matter how much the ingenuity or the imagination of the founders of rites may have perverted or corrupted other symbols, abolishing the old and substituting new ones,—the legend of the Temple Builder has ever been left untouched, to present itself in all the integrity of its ancient mythical form. ”

“ And when at last he emerges into the twilight land which lies between the domains of legend and history, he becomes, after the immemorial habit of the myth, the nucleus round which are concreted innumerable traditions of warlike enterprise and religious animosity—the spontaneous products of a time when the instincts which underlie both are in a state of preternatural excitement. ”

“ The second principle concerns the relation of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated and mystified traditions of real events, which formed so main a part of old mythological researches, seems to grow more hopeless the farther the study of legend extends. Even the fragments of real chronicle found embedded in the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that, far from their elucidating history, they need history to elucidate them. ”

“ The feet are trampling on a lion, and the legs are crossed in token that the warrior was one of those military enthusiasts who so strangely mingled religion and romance, [Pg 332] “whose exploits form the connecting link between fact and fiction, between history and the fairy tale.” It has generally been thought that this interesting figure is intended to represent a genuine Knight Templar clothed in the habit of his order, and the loose garment or surcoat thrown over the ring-armour, and confined to the waist by a girdle, has been described as “a flowing mantle with a kind of cowl.” ”