Chapter 6 THE EPITOME OF CHRISTIAN VALUES

SINCE THEIR FOUNDING on French soil in 1118, the Knights Templar had grown from a pair of self-impoverished knights hoping to keep Muslim terrorists from molesting pilgrims in the Holy Land to a mammoth organization controlling international finance and politics. The founders, Hugh de Payen and Godfroi de St. Omer, organized a group of excommunicated knight-crusaders and secured their absolution by a bishop. After placing the restored knights under oaths of poverty, chastity, secrecy, and obedience, they pledged the organization to rebuilding Solomon’s Temple. Given space adjacent to an Islamic mosque situated upon the Temple’s supposed ruins, they took the corporate name “Poor Knights of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon.”

Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, the leading propagandist of the day, extolled the Templars as “the epitome and apotheosis of Christian values.” Bolstered by such unprecedented promotion, the Poor Knights attracted the best and the brightest young men of Europe to become Crusaders, to vow celibacy and leave their families in defense of Christ’s tomb against Muslim terrorists.

The mission failed within nine years. Even so, Bernard’s propaganda caused the Templars to be received as conquering heroes when they returned to France.

They set up their permanent lodge at Troyes under the patronage of the court of Champagne. (For nearly a century, Troyes had been Europe’s leading school for the study cabalah, which may explain why the city is laid out in the shape of a champagne cork.)

For making the Templars a world power, Bernard shares credit with Cardinal Aimeric of Santa Maria Nuova. Aimeric was the Church’s highest judicial officer. It was his unlawful connivance¹ that created Honorius II, the pope who ordained the Templars as the Church’s most highly-esteemed religious order. It was Aimeric, too, who devised a radical “inner renewal of the Church,” which inspired noblemen throughout England, Scotland, Flanders, Spain, and Portugal to shower the Templars with donations of land and money – over and above the properties required of all initiates upon joining the Order.

When Honorius died in 1130, Aimeric led a minority of cardinals in another connivance resulting in the election of Innocent II, who was consecrated pope in Aimeric’s titular church of Santa Maria Nuova. In 1139, Innocent issued a bull placing the Templars under an exclusive vow of papal obedience – a measure by which Aimeric effectively put all Templar resources at the disposal of the papacy. Within another decade, the Knights were given exclusive rights by Pope Eugenius III to wear the rose croix, the rosy cross, on their white tunics. As their list of properties lengthened with donations from Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary, and the Holy Land, the Templars built hundreds of great stone castles. Wealthy travelers lodged in these castles because of their unmatched security. Convinced they were building a new world, the Templars called each other frère maçon (“brother mason”). Later, this term would be anglicized into “Freemason.”

The Templars invented modern banking by applying an oriental invention to their commerce. Agents of the Chinese emperor Kao-tsung, inventor of paper currency called fei-chi’en, “flying money,” sought trade with the middle east during the period of Templar occupation.² Kao-tsung’s was the first government on earth to enforce circulation of drafts as legal tender for debts. Evidently, Kao-tsung’s agents introduced the Knights to this new medium of exchange created out of merchant drafts. The Templars enhanced their already booming business of (i) accepting current accounts, deposit accounts, deposits of jewels, valuables and title deeds, (2) making loans and advances (charging “fees” because the Church forbade interest), and (3) acting as agents for the secure transmission of such things by (4) adding circulating letters of credit – flying money – to serve as paper currency. To supply the Templars’ currency needs may explain why paper in France was first manufactured in the Poor Knights’ hometown of Troyes.

By 1300, presiding over the world economy from their Paris office,³ the Templars had become an international power unto themselves. Engaged in diplomacy at the highest levels of state from the Holy Land westward, they set the tastes, the goals, the morality, the rules of the civilized world. Kings did their bidding – when Henry III of England threatened to confiscate certain of the Order’s properties, he was upbraided by the Master Templar in the city of London:

“What sayest thou, O King? So long as thou dost exercise justice, thou wilt reign. But if thou infringe it, thou wilt cease to be King.”⁴

But suddenly, at their very zenith, the Poor Knights suffered a strange reversal of fortunes. In 1302, King Philip IV of France dared to challenge their sovereignty on his own soil. He asserted that in France everyone, Knights Templars included, was subject to the King. Pope Boniface VIII jumped in and declared that France, the King, the Templars, all of them, and everybody else as well, belonged to Pontifex Maximus – “It is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” Philip then accused the pope of illegitimacy, sexual misconduct, and heresy. Boniface prepared a bull excommunicating Philip, but before it could be published, a band of the Philip’s mercenaries stormed the Vatican and demanded the pope’s resignation. Although the intruders were driven off, the shock to body and soul was too much for Boniface, and he died a month later.

Two successor popes held firm against Philip, until Bertrand de Got, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was elected in 1305. Crowned in Lyons with the papal name Clement V, de Got moved the papacy to Avignon, and began a long train of concessions to Philip’s royal prerogative. Finally, on Friday, October 13, 1307, Philip arrested all but thirteen of the Templars in France, tried them and, upon evidence of their practice of the cabalah, found them guilty of blasphemy and magic. At least fifty knights were burned at the stake.

From captured documents it was learned that the Templars, from the very beginning, had renounced what Roman theologians called “the religion of St. Peter.” They had been initiated into a secret gnostic branch of the Eastern Church known as “the Primitive Christian Church.” Because the Primitive Christians’ apostolic succession claimed to flow from John the Baptist and the apostle John they were called “Johannites.”⁵

The Johannites believed that although Jesus was “imbued with a spirit wholly divine and endowed with the most astounding qualities,” he was not the true God. Consistent with gnostic logic, the true Johannite God would never lower Himself to become vile human matter. Jesus was in fact a false Messiah sent by the powers of darkness. He was justly crucified – although when his side was pierced he did repent of his pretensions and receive divine forgiveness. Thanks to his repentance, Jesus now enjoys everlasting life in the celestial company of the saints.

Regarding miracles, the Johannites believed that Jesus “did or may have done extraordinary or miraculous things,” and that “since God can do things incomprehensible to human intelligence, all the acts of Christ as they are described in the Gospel, whether acts of human science or whether acts of divine power” can be accepted as true – except for the Resurrection, which is omitted from the Templars’ copy of the Gospel of St. John.⁶ Therefore, for all his wonderful attributes, Christ “was nothing, a false prophet and of no value.” Only the Higher God of Heaven had power to save mankind.⁷

But the Higher God avoided human matter, and so lordship over the material world belonged to Satanael, the evil brother of Jesus. Satanael alone could enrich mankind. Templar cabalah represented Satanael as the head of a goat emblazoned with, sometimes contained within, a pentagram.⁸ This symbol is deeply rooted in Old Testament cabalah, in which the goat is identified with power in the world and separation from God. On the greatest Israelite feastday, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, one goat was spared the sacrificial knife, and was sprinkled with the blood of another goat killed for the sins of Israel. The spared goat, the scapegoat, was then banished from the congregation to bear Israel’s sins into the wilderness, which typified the world.⁹ The scapegoat escaped with his life, his freedom.

King Solomon conferred with evil spirits,¹⁰ but Scripture describes the spirits only generally. However, the Zohar, or “Book of Splendor,” one of the main works of ancient cabalistic literature, tells us evil spirits appeared to the Israelites “under the form of he-goats and made known to them all that they wished to learn.”¹¹ The Templars called this goat-idol “Baphomet,” frombaphe- and –metis, Greek word Baphomet encapsulates the career of Solomon, who Scripture says was absorbed into the wisdom of God more than any other human being,¹² yet finished out his life in communion with he-goatish evil spirits.¹³ By the Templars’ Johannite standard, communing with the evil spirits was the secret to controlling the world. By the biblical standard, however, Solomon represents the impossibility of human perfectibility. Perfectibility is indeed attainable, according to Scripture, but only through the redemptive process shown in the New Testament which Rome kept the Templars from reading.

ON March 22, 1312, Clement V dissolved the Knights Templar with his decree Vox clamantis (“War Cry”). But the dissolution proved a mere formality to further appease Philip. More importantly, it permitted the Templars, in other manifestations, to continue enriching the papacy. For Grand Master Jacques de Molay, just prior to his execution in 1313, sent the surviving thirteen French Templars to establish four new Metropolitan lodges: one at Stockholm for the north, one at Naples for the east, one at Paris for the south, and one at Edinburgh for the west. Thus, the Knights remained the militant arm of the papacy. Except that their wealth, their secrecy, their gnostic cabalism, and their oath of papal obedience were obscurely dispersed under a variety of corporate names.

A subtle provision in Vox clamantis transferred most Templar estates to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who took possession after King Philip’s death. In Germany and Austria, the Templars became “Rosicrucians” and “Teutonic Knights.” The Teutonic Knights grew strong in Mainz, birthplace of Gutenberg’s press. Six centuries later, as the “Teutonic Order,” the Knights would provide the nucleus of Adolf Hitler’s political support in Munich and Vienna.

The Edinburgh lodge would become the headquarters of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, which Masonic historians call “American Freemasonry” because all but five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence are said to have practiced its craft. In Spain and Portugal the Templars became the “llluminati” in whom Iñigo had taken membership at Manresa, and “Knights of Christ.” It was under the red pattée cross of the Knights of Christ that Columbus had taken possession of what he called “las Indias” for King Ferdinand V of Spain, grandfather of Iñigo’s discreet patron, Charles I and V, the Holy Roman Emperor.

As early as August of 1523, as I hypothesized in the previous chapter, this vast yet fragmented subterranean empire – Roman Catholicism’s unseen root-system binding together the world – belonged to Iñigo de Loyola. His spiritual dynasty, which continues to this day, would use this system to cause God-fearing men who hated the papacy to perform, without realizing it, exactly how the papacy wanted them to. But what of Iñigo’s education? His rise in academe is the subject of the next chapter.

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